Don't Quote Me: Online Anonymity Fosters Prejudice
by Kim Ficera, October 5, 2006
Anna's biggest concern was that these kids, in a couple years, will be adults, and they will have been taught that they can humiliate someone like this and get away with it.
Murphy Klasing, lawyer for Anna Draker, a high school administrator who has filed suit against two students that created a MySpace.com profile in her name and posted false information indicating she was a lesbian.
I don't understand how people can be so cruel
I don't believe the website offers useful information to anyone male or female on dating. And I don't believe anyone should be able to post something anonymously.
Todd Hollis, a Pittsburgh lawyer who is suing the operator of DontDateHimGirl.com for posting what he says is erroneous and defamatory information about his health and sexuality.
This morning I did something I've never done before and I hope to never do again. I spent nearly five hours randomly browsing pages on MySpace.com, videos on YouTube.com and posts on DontDateHimGirl.com. I discovered a few things, one of which is that if President Bush is looking for a new form of torture, he need look no further than these websites.
Sure, I've gone to YouTube in the past to watch news segments and Jon Stewart interviews I'd missed, but only today did I view some of the 9,357 videos that resulted when I put the word lesbian into the site's search engine.
What did I learn?
Lez-B-Ns are HOT! They're, like, so much fun! I've always wanted to, like, watch a girl kiss another girl while, like, their boyfriends watch! Girlz lips are, like, so soft, and girlz smell so much better than boys, too! LOL!!! OMG!!!
Shoot me.
I've been to MySpace before, too. But not until this morning did I search the site using the keyword teacher. If you have a child in school, you might want to do the same. You might be shocked by what you discover, but don't believe everything you read.
Last month, Anna Draker, an assistant principal at Clark High School in San Antonio, Texas, filed suit against two 16-year-old students, Benjamin Schreiber and Ryan Todd, who created a MySpace page in which they declared (incorrectly, apparently) that she is a lesbian. In an act of revenge right out of the pages of The Children's Hour, Schreiber and Todd banked on acceptable prejudice to cause Draker pain, and hoped it would get her fired and out of their hair.
The site was online for a month before Draker, who is married to a man and has children, discovered it; luckily for her, MySpace.com removed the site when she reported that it wasn't hers. Although the boys' plans didn't go exactly as they'd hoped, they still might benefit from prejudice when it comes time for punishment. The difference between a slap on the wrist and jail time could boil down to how sympathetic a judge is to the boys' view of strong women and lesbians.
