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.

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.

It began as a typical 21st-century romance.

Girl meets boy over MySpace. Girl and boy exchange flirtatious messages over MySpace.

Boy suddenly becomes mean and sends girl cruel comments over MySpace.

Girl commits suicide.

Boy turns out not to be real.

This is the tragedy the family of 13-year-old Megan Meier, who thought she had befriended a 16-year-old boy named Josh on MySpace, are now dealing with.

Megan, of suburban St. Louis, hanged herself with a belt in her bedroom closet in October 2006 after receiving hateful comments from “Josh Evans,” including one that said the world would be better off without her.

A few weeks later, the Meiers discovered that the MySpace page belonging to “Josh” was fake. It had been created and used by their daughter’s former best friend, her mother and a teenage employee to gain Megan’s trust and find out what Megan thought about her friends.

Tomorrow (Friday), the Washington Post will host Part 2 of a thought-provoking (and frightening) discussion called “Privacy, Free Speech and Anonymity on the Internet” about the Megan Meier case.

Daniel J. Solove, a law professor at George Washington University, will be online at 12 p.m. EST (7 a.m. HST) to answer readers’ questions.

Read the Q&A from Part 1 here. Submit questions before the discussion here.

In my opinion, this is a must-read for anyone who has ever put anything on the internet, not just a MySpace page.

Solove even explains how employers can find that silly Xanga site you deleted ages ago. (It’s called the “Wayback Machine.”)

Recent developments in the case have also prompted what may be a highly important future discussion about free speech.

On Thursday, it was reported by the LA Times that federal prosecutors in Los Angeles are considering charging the mother, Lori Drew, with defrauding MySpace by creating a false account. MySpace is headquarted in Beverly Hills.

Drew was never previously charged because local and federal officials in Missouri couldn’t find a law to apply to the case.

Did the person who created the fake site do anything wrong by pretending to be someone else?

Should anonymity on sites like MySpace be regulated? What about comments on the internet in general? How would this be possible?

Should be an interesting discussion.