Beyond Binary

In an update to a tragic case that I wrote about some months ago, a federal grand jury on Thursday indicted a Missouri woman who allegedly participated in a cruel online hoax that ultimately ended up with a 13-year-old girl committing suicide.

Lori Drew, from the St. Louis area, allegedly posed as 16-year-old Josh Evans on MySpace.com, striking up a relationship with neighbor Megan Meier, a former friend of her daughter's. After befriending Meier, "Josh" then abruptly ended the friendship and sent hurtful messages to Meier, who took her own life shortly thereafter.

According to an Associated Press report, federal prosecutors charged Drew with "one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to obtain information to inflict emotional distress."

The federal charges announced Thursday come after local prosecutors in Missouri were unable to find evidence of a state crime having been committed.

I'll try to get more details from the indictment.

REDMOND, Wash.--Microsoft showed off two social-networking projects at TechFest on Tuesday that show that the company wants to do more in this area than just invest in Facebook.

One project, known as Salsa, aims to use one's corporate data to piece together their social network, or at least their network of co-workers. In its current form, the software is a plug-in to Outlook that shows social-networking information such as a photo and profile next to an incoming e-mail message. The program also pieces together a list of "friends" based on e-mail frequency and other data.

"When you start looking there is a surprising amount of information that gets locked in e-mail," said Shane Williams, one of the Microsoft Research team that worked on Salsa.

Lili Cheng, the Microsoft veteran who heads the social-computing team at Microsoft Research, said that part of the power of Salsa is simply putting a human face on e-mail. She said her own use of the site has borne out the power of that, noting it is harder to argue with a colleague when she sees a picture of them with their cute kid or pet.

"E-mail can be very dehumanizing," Cheng said.

Cheng said that in addition to deploying it inside Microsoft, she'd like to see how Salsa works within one or two other large companies to see if it is more broadly useful.

In another project from Cheng's group, known as C2, Microsoft researchers have created a Windows application that pieces together contact data from a variety of social-networking sites. For the purposes of Tuesday's demonstration, the researchers focused on Windows Live Spaces and Facebook. Researcher Steve Ickman said he chose those two because they represent among the most open (Spaces) and closed (Facebook) when it comes to data sharing.

Although Facebook is notoriously restrictive when it comes to members scraping their data, Ickman said that he believes he was able to stay within Facebook's terms of service by grabbing only approved data from one's own contacts and not caching the information long-term. "It's totally legal, at least at this point."

The project is more of a technology demonstration than anything geared toward a specific product, Ickman said, adding that he hoped it would demonstrate to the product teams that they can be more ambitious. "We tend to cancel things because they are too hard," he said.

Amid continued outcry over the MySpace.com hoax that preceded a teenager's suicide, the town of Dardenne Prairie, Mo., has passed a law banning online harassment.

Although it's only a misdemeanor with a maximum penalty of 90 days in jail or a $500 fine, the law is specifically targeted at the kind of online attack that Meier faced in the days prior to her death last year.

"It is our hope that by supporting one of our own in Dardenne Prairie, we can do our part to ensure this type of harassing behavior never happens again, anywhere," Mayor Pam Fogarty said in a St. Louis Post Dispatch article. "After all, harassment is harassment, regardless of the mechanism or tool."

For those who missed my original posting or the many news reports elsewhere, Meier committed suicide after a falling-out with "Josh," a person she met on MySpace and believed to be a fellow teen in the area. In fact, Josh was the fictional creation of adults, including the parent of a former friend that lived down the street, according to that neighbor's own account in a police report.

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, the community also held a candlelight vigil, organized by Meier's mother.

For more on the community's reaction to the whole affair, check out this Los Angeles Times piece, written by P.J. Huffstutter, a reporter whom I know from my Orange County days a decade ago.

Getting ready for work this morning, I caught a Today Show interview with the parents of Megan Meier, the 13-year-old that I wrote about on Saturday, who committed suicide last year after being taunted on MySpace.

Meier believed she had been chatting on the social network with a boy named Josh. At first, "Josh" sent friendly messages, but after a few weeks, he abruptly turned accusatory and insulting.

Meier's parents found out several weeks after their daughter's death that Josh was actually not a boy, but rather the fictional creation of adults, including the mother of a friend of Megan's, with whom she had a falling-out.

In the Today Show interview, Tina and Ron Meier said that the FBI looked into the matter for some time, but was unable to find a law that had been broken. However, the two said they still hoped civil or criminal action might be possible against the adult cyberbullies.

"We are still continuing on with the fight on the criminal and the civil side," Ron Meier said on the show. A legal expert on the program suggested that a recent federal law prohibiting online harassment might be applicable.

It's an unimaginably sad story.

Megan Meier, a 13-year-old girl who has struggled with issues of self-esteem and depression, is greeted on MySpace by an older boy. He strikes up a flirtation with her over a series of weeks. Then, inexplicably, he starts sending accusatory messages, then nasty ones.

Megan, crushed by the turn of events, takes her own life.

Further twisting the tragedy is the fact that the boy wasn't a boy at all. Rather, he was the creation of adults, including the mother of one of Megan's friends, a girl with whom she had a falling out.

The story--I am summarizing others' reporting here--is now a year old, but was poignantly told this past weekend in the local paper of the Missouri community where it happened.

It has unleashed a torrent of debate, debate over whether the adults committed a crime, whether laws should be changed and whether the newspaper should have named the people involved. It named the girl who committed suicide, but left out the names of those who created the fictitious boy, citing a desire to protect that family's child.

But although the paper chose not to name the family, there were some clues in the story that led bloggers and others to try to deduce the name of the adults who created the fake profile and taunted the girl.

The legal, moral and journalistic issues are significant and many. But to me, the most important lesson is the one for parents. Social-networking sites are incredibly powerful. They can connect us quickly with the world. But like all powerful tools, they can also do irreparable harm. Sometimes Internet speed is too fast, even for good parents, to keep up with.

Clearly, adolescence has always been a tough time and bullies and taunts are nothing new. But we have created a new world for our children and we must be prepared to help them navigate their way through it.

Too many of them aren't making it on their own. Every 16 minutes, someone in the U.S. dies by suicide. Often it's a youngster trying to make sense of the world. Today, on National Survivors of Suicide Day, I encourage everyone, especially those in the technology industry, to examine how we can make our world--virtual and real--a safer one.