A year or so ago, I read a disturbing article in The New Yorker about a 13-year-old who hung herself in her bedroom because she'd been spurned by a boy she'd met on MySpace. Turned out that the "boy" was really a neighborhood Mom who had made up an online persona, along with her teen daughter.
Now that mom has been convicted on three misdemeanor accounts.
This is just horribly insane. Can you even imagine being the parents of this poor teen who killed herself because of a Web hoax?
Usually, not a day goes by when I don't think about how amazing the Web is, how it's enriched so many people's lives, how much I adore blogging. But stories like this remind me of how dangerous the Internet can be, in ways that defy belief.
I have yet to encounter Crazy People in Cyberspace, although once some unknown creep swiped my credit-card info from Web transactions I'd made and went on a shopping spree. Sometimes, I worry about the fact that I put my kids' photos online, but when I decided to do this blog I wanted to do it openly.
Have you heard of any crazy Internet stories?
