I’ve been telling people about this case I am following (via Google news and various blogs) that I think I might as well blog about it. Saves me from having to re-tell it every time I think about it.
Actually I first got to know about it from The Wilful Sunflower’s post. A 13-year old teenager Megan Meier from Missouri (USA) committed suicide last October. She had been diagnosed with ADD and depression, and like all teens before her, clearly had a self-image problem. Read the rest from Wikipedia.org, or the article that broke the story recently here.
For those who can’t be arsed to read, I summarised the popular perception of what happened:
1) Megan Meier and a friend ended their friendship.
2) Friend’s mother created a MySpace account, pretending to be a good-looking 16-year old boy named ‘Josh Evans’ to find out if Megan Meier had been saying anything about her daughter on-line.
3) Josh Evans befriended Megan Meier, gained her trust and confidence. Megan Meier was thrilled by the attention of an older, good looking boy.
4) One day out of the blue, Josh Evans messaged Megan Meier, “I don’t know if I want to be friends with you anymore because I’ve heard that you are not very nice to your friends.”
5) A series of MySpace bulletins and messages including “The world would be a better place without you” led Megan Meier to freak out. Later she attempted suicide by hanging herself with a belt in her closet. She was pronounced dead the next day.
6) Six weeks later, a single mother told the Meiers that ‘Josh Evans’ never existed, and was in fact Megan’s ex-friend’s mother. This ex-friend’s mother also enlisted the help of one of her employees to maintain Josh Evans’ MySpace account. The single mother found out about it because her daughter had been encouraged to join in the ‘joke’. A few other children who knew Megan were also into it.
7) One year later, Steve Pokin wrote an article on the incident, published on the St. Charles Journal.
The Internet community (if there’s one) was angered by what they viewed as a crime committed by the friend’s mother. Big news everywhere, bla bla bla, a blogger (Sarah Wells) followed trails from Steve Pokin’s article, traced down the family’s information, and revealed the name of the ex-friend’s mother. She was identified as ‘Lori Janine Drew’, and the family was friends with the Meiers (prior to the single mother revealing that Drew was involved in the prank, of course).
9) The Drews knew that Megan Meier took medication for depression as she had went on vacations with them before. So it was not as if the Drews did not know what Megan was suffering from. Their lack of remorse was incredulous; according to a police report published by The Smoking Gun:
Drew state she knew “arguments†had broken out between Megan and others on “my space.” Drew felt this incident contributed to Megan’s suicide, but she did not feel “as guilty†because at the funeral she found out “Megan had tried to commit suicide before.”
Another blogger said that outing Lori Drew was the right thing to do, because her behaviour was parallel to that of a typical child predator. The atmosphere is that Lori Drew is right up there as one of the most hated person in America at the moment.
10) After all that heat, city officials where Megan Meier used to live declared this Wednesday that on-line harassment is a crime.
Questions:
a) Is it fair for the Drew family to experience such a massive wrath of Internet mob justice? After their private information was revealed all over the Net, they’d been receiving all sorts of threats, and were victims of a prank call leading to the police rushing to their home thinking that someone was dead.
b) Could it be that Lori Drew had nothing to do with ‘Josh Evans’, but was protecting a loved one (i.e. her young daughter) who was pretending to be Josh Evans? Based on the single mother’s account, it seems unlikely, but you never know.
c) Why can’t MySpace be held accountable, even if so slightly? I once wrote an article about MySpace and crime, and in the course of research, signed up for a MySpace account as a 14-year old girl, the minimum age to be a MySpace member. There was absolutely NO verification process involved, and as 14-year old unverified member, I could EASILY search for other MySpace members to talk to.
Yes, sure that parents need to be responsible for their children’s surfing time as well. The Internet and its various social networking sites are just another means to crime. Somehow I still feel that there are a hell lot more that those sites can do; but in the US, privacy laws seem stricter than ours.
d) Holy fuck what is the world coming to these days?!
