We've all seen the story of a group of Florida cheerleaders ganging up on a fellow student. Their reason? The girl had made mean posts about them on MySpace. It seems every day brings a new case of violence, bullying or other crime facilitated by the Internet.
Today, I saw a unique case in The Seattle Times. This time, it was a grown woman allegedly contributed to the suicide of a 13-year-old girl. The story states,
"She allegedly helped create a MySpace account in the name of someone who didn't exist to convince young neighbor Megan Meier that she was chatting with a 16-year-old boy named Josh Evans."
The girl later hanged herself after receiving cruel messages from the fictional boy. This is a strange case, to say the least. The victim's parents say they monitored her MySpace account. They also admitted that the girl sent mean messages back to "Josh".
The woman who allegedly impersonated Josh Evans will be charged with one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization. The U.S. Attorney in the case says this is the first time the latter charge will be used in a social networking case.
To me, this seems like a long shot prosecution. If the victim's parents were monitoring her account, why didn't they stop what was going on? If they did not feel it was a problem then, why do they believe it contributed to her suicide?
Has any other reader seen this case? If you have any details or thoughts to add, I'd love to hear them.
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1 comment:
this is ridiculous. not only was the girl too young to use MySpace, but her parents felt she was overly susceptible to outside influence, apparently. Nevermind their obvious mandate as parents to keep their kid off the network, the focus is on their obviously deep-rooted feud with Miss Drew, the woman who did it.
but what drives me crazy is that they're prosecuting a woman FOR BEING MEAN. in actuality, Lori Drew is only assisting. not once is her conspirator named (and in my opinion, it would be her own daughter, who hates the 13 year old and has her own vendetta).
there's my two cents.
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