The Trolls Among Us: Weev (not, of course, his real name) is part of a growing Internet subculture with a fluid morality and a disdain for pretty much everyone else online.
Web designer Sean Tevis has raised more than $96,000 from nearly 6,000 people — most of whom aren?t from Kansas — in his bid to unseat Kansas state Rep. Arlen Siegfried.
Yet even as the police tightened security before the Games, the power of new information technologies to chip away at the official line was still on display. In a poor county in Guizhou Province in the south, a teenage girl died under mysterious circumstances, and rumors of police malfeasance and a cover-up spread widely on the Internet, prompting public protests to demand a new investigation.
In 1996, Congress enacted Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides immunity from legal liability for messages posted by anyone other than the operator or proprietor of a site or service. The presence of such a barrier goes far to explain why victims are frustrated, as most poignantly illustrated by Juicy Campus, a campus-gossip Web site.
Over on the blog bavatuesdays, a professor tells of a visit yesterday to the University of Richmond for a lecture that was interrupted by a lockdown following reports of a gunman on the campus. As the audience sat in a dark, locked room awaiting their fates, hoping and praying that tragedy wouldn’t befall another Virginia university, they began communicating and comforting each other via Twitter.
A joke about shooting fellow students, posted to a gossip Web site, led to the arrest of a Colgate University student this month.
A couple of blogs have pointed out that Matt Ivester, creator of the campus gossip blog JuicyCampus.com, has pleaded for a cease-fire among users who have apparently gotten particularly hateful.
In the wake of the shooting at Northern Illinois University, numerous groups commemorating the event have already cropped up on Facebook.
The site is called JuicyCampus, and it opened this summer. Some of the most viewed topics today are “Who is the sluttiest girl????,” “Hottest Cornell Sophomores,” and “Biggest Cornell Cokeheads?” Anonymous users of the site have posted their picks in each category and in many other, similar topics, and many of the students who are named on the site are not amused.
There?s a new breed of networking sites growing on the Web — anti-social sites like Enemybook and Snubster. Some say these sites are a harmless social commentary on the forced cheer of Facebook, but others worry that they may enable online bullying.