4chan wrecks an 11 year old girl's life  

This sort of stuff is horrible. I can't believe people get away with it.

4chan's behavior as an internet entity is the closest thing there is today to the old testament God. Whether for good (bugging scientologists, tracking down and exposing various perverts) or bad (making life hell for people for almost no reason) 4chan is completely random, seemingly ultra powerful and remarkably resourceful in its vindictiveness. And like the old testament god, no matter what you think of yourself it's best to keep as far away as possible.

Yes, the response from 4chan regarding some girl's obnoxious videos is very disproportionate - plus you've got the creeps opining that she deserved all of that nonsense.

With that, my sympathy drops to zero. Especially considering that little rant was the LEAST offensive/sexual thing that girl posted to the internet.

Eleven years old or no, this is the holy wrath her parents should've brought down on her months ago. And if this causes a couple thousand more parents to tighten their sphincters and keep a closer eye on what their kid's doing on that there box with the wires they play Zuma on every weekend, I'm all for it.

Yeah, her parents should have kept an eye on what she was doing online and put a stop to it, and yeah, she sounds like an irritating brat. But most 11 year old kids are shitty and do stupid things without thinking about the consequences. That doesn't mean they deserve this kind of harrassment.

Yeah, there's very rarely enough justification for the kind of crap that Anonymous pulls.

"Get AIDS and Die"?

Shiiiit, she sounds like she'd fit right in with Anon.

Thanks for the link, Harley. I couldn't stand the first video with her rants.
Slightly off topic, could you imagine a 11 year old banned from Internet?

"I'll pop a glock in your mouth and make a brain slushie"

"Fist yourself to your little beastiality magazines, get a papercut on your fucking clit or dick, and I hope the bitch falls off. OKAY!"

gold...

10$ she was hired by Mel Gibson to distract us from his racists outbursts.

That girl is a brat. The backlash was definitely disproportionate, but she had to expect that people would respond. You play with fire, you get burned. I hope she learned her lesson. At the same time, the people responsible for harassing her should be punished. There are laws about stalking and threatening people; you can't do it. This whole story is crazy.

watch the last video on that link. Brat.

"Pop a glock in your mouth, and make a slushi?" WTF?

You put your video up, say stuff like that, what do you expect to happen?
But thank god for her father, I mean, he's the real hero in all this he's "dun backtraced all the addresses and reported them to the cyber police", and if it does go further "he will unleash consquences that will NEVER be the same"

Fucking Hell, she's an eleven year-old idiot. Unless every single person doing the harassing is eleven too they should probably know better.

Hey, man.

Haters gon' hate.

I hate to say it, but in light of her original rant, I can't help but feel a bit of schadenfreude about how she was treated.

Still, death threats...

Apparently the death threats thing was an over exaggeration according to the police.

Everyone involved in this, from 4chan to the girl to the parents, need some serious help.

This. Pretty much everyone's an idiot when they're eleven - I mean back in my day the internet wasn't as all consuming as it is now, so you did prank phone calls instead of YouTube flame wars. Likewise, a lack of internet access meant most of us probably didn't know about bestiality yet, but we sure made it a point of honour to know "words no eleven year old should know", and I remember "get AIDS and die" being a hearty rejoinder (AIDS as a whole was a pre-teen's idea of comedy gold - it involved TEH GAYS and joking about it would piss adults off, what's not to like?)

I mean, not saying the girl shouldn't have gotten grounded or anything, but "holy wrath"? Get real. This was a pathetic piece of bullying courtesy of the biggest enablers of the type of behaviour this girl indulged in.

The fisting/beastiality quote reminds me of the musical stylings of Wesley Willis (youtube it, I can't provide a linke from work).

no ones saying she deserves death threats, harrasing phone calls, etc... but, if she's smart enough to post a video online, she should know, just from the comments on youtube alone, expect some sort of backlash.

Suck my non-existent dick, and get aids and die... yeah, this girl is a victim?

She didn't target specific people and flood their inboxes and home phone numbers with it though.

no she didnt. But that's not the point. This is a pure case of crazy people escalating the problem instead of just dropping it. The girl posts videos on youtube thinking she's important, she gets a backlash on the comments. She then reacts to the comments with rude, insulting, gross insults. 4chan takes it 4 steps further (like they always do), and stars publishing info about her. Instead of her parents being parents and taking the fucking internet away from her cause she's clearly to dumb to be posting videos online, they go back on, and leave another internet rant.

you slap a dog once, and get bit, why the fuck are you slapping the dog again?

The kid sucks, yeah, but 4chan sucks worse.

I could understand that if it was 4chan she went after initially. This is like slapping the dog and having someone from the next county over who heard about it burn your house down.

This guy. We got the Internet when I was 12 and yeah, I still did phony phone calls. I'd occasionally be a dick in AOL Chat and there were parental controls installed (by the way, do ISPs still provide parental controls?). By the time being an obnoxious ass en masse on the Internet had serious consequences, I was in college and couldn't be bothered to troll. Wish I could say that about everyone.

Oh, and I learned why Animalities weren't called Beastialities in Mortal Kombat 3 around the age of 12, so I still found that out early. It wasn't as easy as a wikipedia search though.

lol, no she shouldn't!

Kids are savvy with technology; there are probably five year olds who know how to upload a video to YouTube.

Kids are not savvy with emotional maturity, nor indeed should they be expected to be.

A more reasonable argument would be that the parents are to blame for not supervising her online presence enough. That I'd agree with, though I can't help but feel a degree of sympathy - the generational gap in knowing how to use one's InterWebs grows more gigantic by the second and I have no hard time believing the parents knew nothing at all about this.

It takes almost no smarts to upload a video anymore. There are phones and cameras that do it automatically (well, with one click of a button).

Her parents need to be taken to task quite seriously for their reaction. Eleven year olds want attention and it's quite clear that this is what the girl was after. When she got the wrong kind of attention and told her parents what happened they should've been explaining that you don't get to control what kind of attention you get. And then they should've shut down her net access, reported any real death threats* to the authorities and given the media no access to her or them.

Instead this girl is getting exactly what she wanted in the first place, attention and notoriety.

*They also should never have lied/exaggerated about death threats.

Just purely for statistical reasons I would be interested in finding out the average age of a 4chan random /b/ poster.

Also, I liked the internet better when this type of stuff originated from the Something Awful forums.

Even then it wasn't as malicious as that, plus they just usually ended up getting banned by Lowtax anyway.

Aaannnnd this is why I shall never darken the doorstep of the Name Change thread since the rules were modified to state only to real names and nevermore shall you change again.

Weren't you just defending kids being kids and the like on that Babies on Airplanes thread? I guess I should go look before accusing...

Yeah, the parents are fucking idiots, but there's no reason in hell other adults should be treating someone they know is a dumb kid this way.

I can almost cut the dad some slack, because I'm not sure how I'd react to 4chan going after my 11-year-old daughter.

It struck me how helpless people can be when they're moving in an environment (in this case, online) that they clearly don't fully comprehend. The dad did exactly what would have been appropriate if his daughter had been threatened in a real life situation - walk over to the person doing the threatening, confront them and tell them to cut the crap. But of course doing the exact same thing online is what the kids today refer to as an "epic fail".

And yet, the question is never asked "Why is this happening?"

Even after the media attention, the parents seem ridiculously ignorant of what their daughter did to warrant this.

Sending a little girl death threats is shitty on principle, but I still can't muster up any part of me that feels bad that someone on this planet felt her actions had consequences.

It still takes a village to raise a child. It's just on the internet, that village is Summerisle.

Sooo...basically - "She was ASKIN' for it?" Jesus, guys.

Yeah, hard for me to see an 11-year-old girl as warranting anything. She's a dumb kid who made a dumb mistake. She didn't deserve the wrath of Anonymous.

Well, if "it" is being mocked on the internet, then yeah, pretty much. If it's having pizzas ordered to her house and the odd prank phone call, that's going a bit overboard, but still fairly harmless. Death threats are obviously way beyond the pale, but apparently that didn't really happen?

You don't think that realizing that complete and total strangers have access to every single bit of your personal information - and even worse they've shared it with EVERYBODY and ANYBODY - is fucking TERRIFYING? Especially if you're 11? I don't care if the worst thing they did was send her a few pizzas - posting that information was fucked up and horrible.

Bullshit. The reaction may have been overboard, but motherfuck the idea kids have no personal accountability, especially if they're posting shit in the most public of public forums.

Which, I might add, I'm still wondering how she was a member to begin with. I don't doubt there are ways around it, but isn't 13 the age gate in order to even sign up for myspace, Facebook, and Tumblr?

Yes. Finding things about people who are being tools isn't a problem. Letting them know you know which of the two Olive Garden's in their town they are a dishwasher at isn't a problem. Letting other people in on that info not knowing what those other people will do with said information is a problem.

I notice that my friend suggestions on Facebook are often the single digit aged children's pages of my friends. That bothers the fuck out of me. Especially when they can't even walk yet.

I haven't been following this closely at all. Was the information that got spread around more extensive than what she put up on her own videos and profile?

I'm also at a bit of a loss as to what personal information an 11 year old really has. Obviously we're not talking about bank account numbers, medical records, credit reports, voting history, or the other stuff that an adult would reasonably expect to be kept confidential. You have an address and a home phone (assuming your family still rolls like that) and that's about it, I'd think.

I certainly don't want to be on 4chan's side of any issue. The behavior toward the girl was dickish and unnecessary when viewed in the absolute most favorable light. But at the same time, whether the internet is involved or not, the realization that acting out can draw negative attention as well as positive is a big part of growing up (and growing up is frequently fucking terrifying). The way in which she learned this lesson was certainly harsh, but life is like that sometimes. I just don't see that casting her as an entirely blameless victim is doing her any favors.

I just don't see how this reaction, from adults (apparently), counts as accountability. Wouldn't telling a child to stop, banning her from posting and perhaps trying to contact her parents be the normal adult reaction? Followed, of course, by ignoring her dumb behavior, because right now these idiots are feeding into it.

That's how you hold a dumb kid accountable. Tell her she's being dumb, block her access to it and let her parents know. You don't attack her en masse and make her vulnerable to every sick fuck on the internet.

...that...that was what I was saying...was I unclear?

I've never understood the idea that people who behave mildly irresponsibly (or simply immaturely, as an 11 year old might) should have the wrath of god brought down on them. It's equivalent to saying a kid who tried to do something stupid on a skateboard deserves to break his leg and be in a cast for six months. As a lesson, of course.

Not to curse this discussion, but I've heard this same tone from people arguing against abortion. It's strangely emotional and draconian. You can make a mistake and learn from it without having the shit beaten out of you by the consequences.

No no - I was basically saying "QFT" but with more words.

Bullseye.

Apparently, 4chan got access to her info because several of its members friended her on MySpace, Tumblr, and Facebook. And they weren't stealthy about it. The main account that got her info called himself I.P. Freely, for fuck's sake.

Not sayin' she was askin' for it, but...well....

The 'punishment' doesn't really fit the 'crime' in this case, but holy shit that girl's video was annoying. I watched it for about two minutes before I realised it was like watching a dog chase its own tail.