One of the saddest things is that this isn't really that rare. Women and girls have long known that coming forward and expecting justice is often a path to destroying what life you have left. In the U. S., in the early 2000s, a Michael Jackson fan was so bullied on a popular 'message board' that she took her life. The bully used the handle Rock of Ages, ironically. The FBI investigated and were unable to find the culprit, at which point they implemented restrictions forcing every person commenting to have a valid account with a stable ISP. Prior to that, anyone could go into these ad-free message boards, take up a name for that day or that moment, and say whatever they wanted without having to give any personal information or even reveal their servers ISP, some of which changed according to where the service was picked up. By 2010, there was no such thing as anonymous message boards any more or random ISPs. Many sites closed down. Most of the social media sites that popped up after that, like My Space and Yahoo and eventually facebook, were adhering to the new rules, and taking full advantage of people being forced to provide verifiable identification -- sitting ducks for the now out of control marketing and media brainwashing.
Initially, people wanted the internet to be lawless, people fight for it daily. FB was forced to rebrand itself as a news source by the Trump administration after he took them to court over their continued activity of shutting down Republican pages and deleting supporting posts while highlighting the Democrat posts -- Dems being the people who owned and controlled FB. In response, FB repackaged themselves a news source (without advertising it), which legally enables them to 'slant' their 'news' to uphold their shareholders political ideals.
A lot of people just don't realize how dysfunctional and disturbing the internet is, at this point.
While Rehtaeh was victimized by the police and her own school, part of the problem is there's no laws on the internet.
So if you're one of those people supporting ACLU etc who are trying to keep the internet 'free,' you're part of the problem. It's also how Al Qaida was able to bomb NYC and how some of our military were tracked by the enemy during actual warfare. I don't know about Canada, but as an American, I believe it is past time to put our tangible laws onto the intangible internet. Yes, it will take away some of our 'privacy,' but so far that demand for privacy may be behind the reason such an incapable man was installed in the oval office against the will of the people. There are very realistic data pointing to Russian tech experts being paid by the Clintons to flip the votes. I mean, think about that: you go fill out a form manually but then that info is entered and tallied electronically. But even the investigation didn't know how to investigate because the technology to do that isn't even on the books.
I know this sounds like a rant about something else, but it's not. We can't keep turning a blind eye to a place that is rife with criminal activity: the internet. We lock our front door to potential strangers but we allow our kids to be online with some of the worst people you'd ever meet.
God bless Anonymous! So glad he/it/they came through for this family. I was so moved by this and some other things I read about Anonymous that I searched for how to support them. Turns out one of their main goals is to keep the internet free from standard laws. It seems they turn a blind eye to what's really happening with that freedom even as they use their abilities to right some of the wrongs.
Such a tragedy.
Thanks for reading.
