ArticleSnatch Blog

You are browsing the search results for "suicide."

The U.S. government charged a mother who allegedly used MySpace in a deadly hoax that drove her daughter’s 13-year-old classmate (pictured here) to suicide with conspiracy.

Missouri resident Lori Drew, after her daughter’s schoolgirl fights with neighbor Megan Meier, 13, created a fake MySpace account to pose as a boy and flirt with Meier. When Drew began using her online identity to taunt Meier, the girl hanged herself.

The boy Megan had been corresponding with on MySpace unexpectedly began calling her a fat slut. He wrote “the world would be a better place without you.” It turns out he was a hoax created by the mother of a former friend.

Drew was indicted today for conspiracy and accessing protected computers without authorization to inflict emotional distress. She faces 20 years in prison, the maximum penalty.

“Any adult who uses the internet or a social gathering website to bully or harass another person, particularly a young teenage girl, needs to realize that their actions can have serious consequences,” Los Angeles federal prosecutor Thomas O’Brien, who brought the charges, said in a statement.

The case was filed in California, where MySpace is headquartered.

The suit goes a long way toward establishing and enforcing the boundaries of acceptable and illegal behavior on the Internet in general and social media sites in specific.

Cato the Elder once said, "I would much rather have men ask why I have no statue, than why I have one."  But Cato the Elder died over 2,000 years ago, and somewhere along the way, a few kids seem to have gotten the idea that Bebo and MySpace pages are desirable memorials.
read more

More: [...]

Search marketers can enrage diehard members of social communities who want to keep marketers at bay. The result? Death threats, cyberterrorism, obscene language, cyberharassment, and calls for suicide.
Social media marketers see StumbleUpon and social networking sites like Facebook as theirs to mine for traffic, links, and sales. A just-released Sapient study shows marketers [...]

I subscribe to hundreds of RSS feeds in order to keep up with the world we cover here at WebProNews… eBusiness and search. Here are some of the blog posts and news articles I noticed today that I found interesting.
Deceiving Google is becomingvery bad for business and PayPerPost isn’t happy!
>>> Yahoo goes to BlogWorld and [...]

Islamist militants are getting better at gearing their message online to specific audiences including women and children according to a meeting hosted by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

"One of the most alarming trends we found on the Internet recently is what we call ‘narrowcasting’," said Gabriel Weimann, professor of communications at the [...]

Over two months ago, authorities in Turkey found a video on YouTube that implied Ataturk, the country’s founder, was gay.  Turkey banned YouTube, YouTube removed the clip, and the Turkish government got way too cocky - it’s now reserved the legal right to block any website with content it finds offensive to Ataturk’s memory.
Our [...]

The top Google searches from the past week carry a sobering dichotomy of elation and sorrow as information seekers sought to join in the celebration of March Madness as well as take part in mourning the suicides of actor/comedian Richard Jeni and former Boston frontman Brad Delp.
The opening weekend of the NCAA Tournament is behind [...]

One of the fastest way to minimise your chances of web business success is to use a Content Management System (CMS). There are a number of open-source CMS products, such as phpWS, Mambo, Plone…
More: continued here
content management systems equal business suicide