I’ve been following this story because I believe it could have some major implications for cyberbullying and fake profile pages on social networking pages like MySpace.com and Facebook … or at least the potential to start some interesting discourse about such things.

In 2006, 13-year-old Megan Meier (pictured) befriended who she thought was a cute, flirtatious 16-year-old boy on MySpace. Megan, who was suffering from attention deficit disorder and depression, thought she had finally found a friend in “Josh Evans,” when he suddenly cut off their friendship and started sending her hateful messages, including one that allegedly said the world would be better off without her.

Megan hanged herself in her bedroom closet shortly after.

It was later discovered that the “Josh Evans” MySpace account was fake, allegedly created by a mother and her daughter to find out what Megan felt about the daughter and other people. On Thursday, a Los Angeles federal grand jury indicted Lori Drew, 49, the woman who allegedly created the MySpace account, on a charge of conspiracy and three counts of fraudulently accessing someone’s computer.

Why should we care? Forget kids meeting face-to-face and beating each other up at lunchtime — now they can do that AND post the evidence on YouTube. Besides videos, sites like MySpace, which essentially allow anyone to create a profile as any person they wish (real or not), have enabled catty teenagers to take their cattiness to cyberspace and, often, inflict far more psychological and emotional damage. It’s one thing to endure a bully at school when you can call in the principal or go home after class. It’s quite another when bullying reaches the internet and it’s impossible to escape.

There’s another reason, of course, which a Los Angeles Times op-ed today lays out nicely:

[As] hard as it may be to feel sympathy for Drew, what the Justice Department has done should alarm anyone who uses the Internet. The legal theory underpinning this case could just as easily be used to attack other kinds of anonymous speech online, including whistle-blowing, or to enforce dubious contracts that websites impose unilaterally on their users.
…

Terms of service online are routinely breached, sometimes unwittingly, sometimes deliberately. Violations include checking work e-mail from home (most residential broadband services forbid business uses) and submitting fake personal information when posting comments online. If a terms-of-service violation were all it took to bring federal charges, overly zealous prosecutors would be in a position to indict just about anyone who used the Internet.

Of course, the use of the statute in this case could be challenged, but just THINK about the implications.

It’s hard not to think about how Megan’s parents would feel should the people involved in tormenting her daughter be sent to prison. It’s also hard not to think about what such a conviction would mean for everyone who’s ever posted anonymously on the internet.

A meeting with my Chinese friend/tutor on Saturday turned to a very interesting discussion about China, Tibet, media bias and media control. She is from Nanjing, is in her twenties and graduated from HPU last semester. Like many young Chinese, especially those now living outside China, she is frustrated with the characterization of the Tibet conflict in the foreign press as a “crackdown” by Chinese police on innocent Tibetan dissidents.

She’s not alone. The recent protests in Lhasa, which began on March 14 on the anniversary of a failed 1959 uprising, spurred intense feelings of nationalism among young Chinese and a debate that continues on YouTube and Facebook.

A few of my Chinese friends on Facebook have posted a link to anti-CNN.com in their profiles (full disclosure: I was an intern at CNN’s Beijing bureau in spring 2005). The site, which includes several videos, is dedicated to pointing out anti-China bias in the foreign media. One friend’s Facebook profile picture is an image of a T-shirt that reads: “I LOVE CHINA.” Facebook groups that are variations on the “Free Tibet” movement have been joined by a number of groups supporting “One China.”

For example, the group “Tibet WAS, IS, and ALWAYS WILL BE a part of China” has 20,167 members and seems to be adding members by the hundreds every week. Not all comments posted on the group’s wall adhere to rules outlined in the group’s profile (”NO RACIST REMARKS” and “NO HATE TALKS”).

My friend believes foreign journalists are misrepresenting the conflict, and that is exacerbated by a view in America, popularized in part by the Free Tibet movement, that the Chinese government is oppressing Tibetans. The way she see it, she said, the People’s Liberation Army’s entrance into Tibet in 1950 was not the “invasion” it is often said to be; rather, the army entered a country that was backwards and still relying on a feudal system, and helped Tibet to modernize.

Regardless of what you may think about Tibet’s complicated history, I was interested in her frustration in explaining her views to others. We started using the word “brainwashed.” For many young Chinese, the biggest problem in explaining your opinion to your foreign counterparts besides the language barrier is the fact that many people simply EXPECT you to be in support of your government and without sympathy for Tibetans.

“Of course you think the Communist Party is right,” they nod and say, as if to a child. “You’ve been brainwashed by your government and your country’s education system.”

My friend is not naive about the ills her government has committed over the years, unlike some young Chinese I met in Beijing for whom it seemed large chunks were missing in their understanding of their country’s history. My friend only learned certain details about what happened at Tiananmen Square in 1989 after she left China and moved to the United States. She is well aware that the government exercises more control over the media in China than in the United States.

In the end, though, media bias is not media censorship. This is not to excuse the media that have been accused of anti-China bias, but to point out the irony of anti-CNN’s creators spending time rooting up evidence of foreign media bias when media censorship stares Chinese citizens in the face every day. Censorship of topics like Tiananmen and human rights is still heavily exercised in China. Earlier this month, a Beijing court sentenced Hu Jia, one of China’s most prominent political activists, to 3.5 years in prison. Hu had written controversial articles on web sites and made comments in the foreign media about human rights.

Even what Chinese citizens can read in newspapers or watch on TV about what is happening in Tibet is limited.

It may just be stirrings of nationalist sentiment, but Chinese netizens have attacked foreign media bias with a zeal that suggests objectivity and journalistic integrity are at least of some importance to them. Now if they could only do it in their own country — imagine what would happen.

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Related reads:

Danwei: “The Internet wages war on the liberal media.” (April 14)
Matthew Forney in the NYT (op-ed): “China’s Loyal Youth” (April 13)
EasySouthWestNorth: translation of Chang Ping’s “Where does the truth about Lhasa come from?” (April 3) [Chang, an editor with China’s Southern Metropolis Weekly, created controversy when he posted this piece on his blog]
The China Beat: “The Taelspin on Tibet: The Chinese Response to foreign media coverage of the 3.14 unrest” (March 27)
CNN: “Transcript: James Miles interview on Tibet” (March 20) [Miles, of The Economist” talks about being in Tibet during the unrest]

photo: www.anti-cnn.com

If people think we Quarterlifers are narcissistic, fickle and totally naive about splashing our personal information all over the internet, Ashley Alexandra Dupre is not helping our cause.

The 22-year-old aspiring singer, better known as “Kristen,” whose alleged encounters with former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer led to his resignation last week, is the fifth most-searched subject on Google and an internet sensation whose songs are apparently among the hottest downloads on MySpace.

This may be either the best or worst thing that has ever happened to her.

As of this evening, about a dozen Facebook groups have been created and dedicated to discussing Dupre, many of them defending her, including the Ashley Alexandra Dupre Fan Club, and one that has apparently been created by people who went to school with her. The group description says: “For all of us who went to school with the now famous Ashley Youmans. (hey, someone had to start a group)”.

She also (even before last week) had a sizeable internet footprint through online social networking sites, where she posted pictures of herself and samples of her music. When news of her involvement with Spitzer broke, she did what any 22-year-old might do. She jumped on her Facebook and MySpace accounts and started deleting information.

What interests me is the apparent way in which she selectively deleted information from her accounts. According to CNN, time stamps on her profile show that she was up all night altering information on her profile page.

She removed most of the photos, but not all of them, and left up a clip of one of her songs and several links to it, as if trying to select what journalists and others trying to find her could see.

She also apparently confronted the people who called herself her high school classmates: “Do me a favor and don’t try to cash out… thanks,” she wrote on the Facebook group wall.

According to CNN, on Thursday morning she wrote: “Sneaking out the back door” under her “current status.”

What amazes me about Dupre’s actions is that this was less like a woman caught at the center of a national headline-making sex scandal and more like a teenager changing her profile to mess with her boyfriend’s head.

Most of us within our lifetimes probably won’t be similarly caught at the center of national attention. But the example does serve as another lesson to Quarterlifers about why we have to start thinking differently about posting personal information online, especially as we enter the working world. This isn’t high school anymore.

Someday, some of us will be making headlines, but I hope for different reasons. And when that happens, hopefully there won’t be a MySpace page lurking somewhere in the background. Unless you want to launch your budding music career, of course.

How do you know when you’ve had enough to drink?

“You see beers all over a table so you lift each one up until you find one half full and chug it when no one is looking.” (#10)

“You call your ex-boyfriend 1,000 times and leave lots of really nice voicemails saying that ya’ll need to hang out more.” (#29)

“You’ve become convinced that dancing with your arms overhead, shaking your ass, and yelling WOO HOO is truly the sexiest dance move EVER.” (#3)

A Facebook group called “30 Reasons Girls Should Call it a Night” is getting attention because of its list of 30 reasons, plus nearly 5,000 photos posted on the site of girls being, well, just drunk and ridiculous.

The group has 174,685 members.

From ABCNews.com:

[M]any photos on the site are accompanied by full names and the colleges they attend, showing a blatant disregard for the fact that potential employers could be viewing their drunken exploits.

A study by the networking firm Viadeo recently found that one in five employers now uses social networking Web sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, to research information on job candidates and to view how they project themselves. Almost two thirds said their recruitment decisions were influenced by the contents of an individual’s profile, while a quarter said that they had changed their mind and decided not to hire someone because of what they found online.

As if you needed another reason to not post ridiculous photos of yourself or your friends online…

At 24, I’ve never been “In a Relationship.”

Hang on. I’m not THAT socially awkward. I have been in a relationship. I’ve just never been “In a Relationship” on Facebook.

Facebook, the internet social networking site created and launched by a Harvard drop-out in 2004, has 64 million users today. It got its name from college “facebooks” — actual printed booklets given to freshmen with mugs of other students and faculty which are supposed to help them get to know people on campus. (Personally, we just used ours to look up cute guys…)

Facebook used to only be open to students at certain colleges. But as of Sept. 2006, it is now open to anyone over 13. Anyone who signs up for a Facebook account can message other Facebook users, write on others’ pages (”the wall”), or list their favorite books, movies and quotes alongside millions and millions of pictures of themselves.

But on this Valentine’s Day, Facebook is changing — or complicating — the dating scene with features that allow individuals to publicize their relationship status. One feature allows two people to show on each of their pages that they are “In a Relationship.” (Useful if you’re browsing the site for attractive singles.)

Besides “In a Relationship,” you also have the option of choosing “Married,” “Engaged,” “In an Open Relationship” or “It’s Complicated.”

All of those options are not as binding as the last option, which shows “In a Relationship” and then adds “with,” after which you can add the name of the person you are seeing. In order to show the “with” option, both people must agree that they want to make it “Facebook official.”

The wonderful — and complicated — thing about this is that Facebook doesn’t discriminate. For example, I could be “Married to” my best girl friend tomorrow, as long as she agreed.

Right now, one of my guy friends is “In an Open Relationship” with Jessica Biel.

You can imagine that this can be used for good as well as evil. Two of my friends, a guy and a girl, went to Bangkok for spring break last year, took tons of pictures together, changed their Facebook “relationship status” and convinced everyone that they had gotten engaged. The next day she received dozens of messages: “You look so HAPPY! This is soooo exciting! CONGRATS!!!”

That’s actually hilarious and harmless. But according to this article, obsessions with checking Facebook, especially your partner’s page, can promote jealously in long-distance relationships if one person suspects the other may be receiving too many messages from other Facebook users — especially if the other users are cute.

Photos can be another source of problems. For your stalking convenience, another feature allows you to view all pictures posted on Facebook in which a certain person appears. I’ve heard of relationships going to pieces after a friend posted risque photos of someone’s significant other having a little too much fun over spring break.

For myself personally, I avoid posting my relationship status on Facebook or dozens of photos of myself and my significant other, because I believe things like that don’t really need to be publicized. Posting my relationship status, determining whether we’re serious (or not serious) enough to be in a relationship as well as “In a Relationship,” seems to me to be just one more complication in the already complicated game of love.

I can only imagine what Facebook is doing to high school relationships, where the idea of being “official” is everything — even if it’s just a label. When I was in high school, two people could walk past each other in the halls, barely talk, never go on dates and still be “in a relationship.” Now they can do all that AND be Facebook official!