In October, I wrote an article about Amanda Todd, a Canadian teen who was so severely cyber-bullied that she committed suicide. Now, in a strange turn of events, I am being threatened in her name.

Someone claiming to be from the hacker group “Anonymous” sent an email recently, demanding I remove images created by Todd’s bullies from the piece. My intention in using these images was to condemn bullying by showing the horrors Todd experienced, so you can imagine my surprise on Sunday when I received this:

From: Anonymous <Redacted@redacted.com>

Message Body:

Whether or not this person is a hacker, and whether or not I should be “expecting” Anonymous on my site, outside my home, or for dinner is unclear. Seven days have passed, and though I feel safer now than I did yesterday, I still have no idea what to expect. However, regardless of the legitimacy of this threat, the email raises a number of ethical questions.

Am I being bullied by this alleged Anonymous, or am I the bully?

In the days since receiving it, this email has been pretty much all I think about. I have contacted my web host and searched the Twitterverse, trying to uncover my harasser to no avail. I have scoured the Internet for related hashtags and learned more about #Anonymous than intended, as I sit here contemplating my decision and its potential outcomes.

While I feel the use of images portraying the horrors of cyber-bullying is legitimate in the context of critical discussion, am I contributing to the problem by displaying them? Since Todd herself spoke out so publicly against her bullies through the YouTube video she made shortly before she hung herself, I imagine she would have wanted the discussion surrounding bullying and the Internet to continue, and discussion includes documentation.

I’m reminded of a recent article published in the Jewish Daily Forward in which a journalist writes of her hesitation to print graphic quotes from Veronique Pozner, a mother who chose to view the body of her son Noah, a student murdered at Sandy Hook elementary school. She told the reporter:

Pozner had nothing to gain by describing her son’s corpse; his murderer was already dead. She wanted only to shed light on the issue of gun violence.

The mother of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy who was beaten and shot to death in a racially based attack, changed history in 1955 when she decided to hold an open casket funeral for him and allow photographs of his body.

But I am not Amanda Todd’s mother, and since the images are part of a vicious meme that contributed to her death, one might say they are not the aftermath of a tragedy, but its manifestation. One friend of mine said that if Todd’s mother was behind the email, I had better take the images down. Another suggested fear-based capitulation and silence. A third person argued that repeating the meme in any form was lending it credence and that I was dumb not to see the hacker’s point.

A meme is like an echo. It’s a game of telephone. A meme births its own annihilation, as repetition and alteration gives way to meaninglessness and it becomes nothing more than a guttural sound, a blip, a sputter. A meme is what you make of it.

So, rather than removing the images, I decided to alter them.

On the Internet, where an image presented may be easily and instantly removed from its context and replicated endlessly, presenting it unaltered may be akin to presenting it without commentary at all. However, altering an image is hardly standard journalistic practice; journalism seeks to be objective and truthful. Journalists fight so that images will not be suppressed. But the memes that haunted Amanda Todd are part of a bigger story and alteration has now hopefully become part of its unfolding.

From a psychological perspective, the most insensitive memes might be viewed as ways in which society reclaims a tragic event and re-write it as comedy. Certain things are so tragic or violent that they defy explanation and all we can do is laugh to keep from crying. But all the theory and comedic nuance in the world doesn’t do much to help a bullied child, just like discussion of the email threat I received doesn’t make it any less disturbing. Showing the email to friends and colleagues and writing this article has in many ways made the threat more alive and present. It lives inside my head perhaps in the same way Todd’s tormentors lived inside hers, and like Todd, I am seeking solace and support online—the place where all my trouble began in the first place.

Ironically, if anyone believes that perpetrators of hate and bullying should be outed and their ways exposed, it would seem to be Anonymous. The entity was recently credited with releasing shocking footage in the Steubenville Ohio sex crime case. In the video, a college student is deriding and mocking the girl at the center of the case who, after drinking and becoming unconscious, was carried around to various football parties and sexually abused.

While my goal in using images created by Amanda Todd’s bullies (and my goal in writing this article) is not to allow the public to locate the bullies and exact retribution, like those who released the Steubenville video, I aim to shed light on a cruel situation. Both the images I used and the Steubenville video show the power of the Internet to inflict psychic pain in an instant. In the Steubenville sex crime case, tweets and images of the victim were posted on Twitter before she was even conscious to see them.

While it would be a better world if the Internet was purged of cyber-bullying, the people who should be held accountable are those responsible for it, not the journalists who report on its existence. Though it might be argued that sites that shed light on cyber-bullies also benefit from them in some way, since they create a fraction of our content, that is the same as saying the New York Times benefits directly from bombings and war– while possibly true, it borders on ridiculous.

Obviously Amanda Todd’s death is first and foremost a tragedy, not a lesson, but if I allow the horrors she experienced (contained in the images I published) to be forgotten or whitewashed by the Internet’s self-cleaning mechanism of deletion and new traffic flow, am I really helping? Further, if I adhere completely to my blackmailer’s demands, am I participating in censorship and fear-based limits on free speech?

In receiving my “Anonymous” email I was forced to come to terms with the dangers of the Internet. Late at night, I received a phone call from a 000000000 number. There was no message, but was it them? My site got shut down briefly last week and I was up panicking, was it them? I am experiencing a certain type of paranoia that only the Internet can engender, where every glitch has a meaning, where I both anticipate and fear being known. As if Facebook could suddenly look back at me and see me at home in my underwear. As if I will suddenly be unmasked and targeted specifically in a public space.

Like many Internet denizens, members of Anonymous pride themselves on lurking in the shadows. They don masks in public, in an act that conveys both fear and power: they are unknown so they are frightening, but they are masked so they must be afraid too. They are at once a product of the Internet and of our collective imagination, representing all the invisible justice and terror lurking out there in the world.

While many of the actions of Anonymous seem noble, if this is indeed an act on its behalf, it is far from noble. If it is not an affiliated act and rather a perversion of its goals, it shows how easy it is to pretend and frighten just with a simple email. I am reminded of how terrified Amanda Todd must have felt when she found out she had an Internet stalker: someone unknown, lurking in the shadows who, in many ways, we should all be “expecting.”

This email threat is in and of itself a good argument for enhanced Internet policing, which is, oddly, what this alleged Anonymous member wants for our site. However, the entity Anonymous seems to be against censorship, based upon its love of hacking and incredible use of free speech. It is therefore odd that someone would claim to be part of Anonymous in order to threaten a website that is ostensibly on its side.

Perhaps all this means is that when vigilante justice is exacted, it can turn into just as narrow-minded a regime as it sought to overthrow. Perhaps this means that one individual decided to do something impulsive and it shouldn’t be taken seriously, but more likely it means that in order to have real discussions online, we must all become more technologically sophisticated. We must think critically about the ways in which the Internet is different from the printed page and learn how to play with its strengths and weaknesses: “the medium is the message.” We must try to understand the consequences of our online actions, regardless of our intentions and must gain the technical skills to level the playing field to fight back against those seeking to limit free discourse, whoever they may be. In the words of Josh Kopstein and protesters everywhere: It is no longer OK not to know how the Internet works.

This article first appear on Alternet

Just weeks after the suicide of Canadian teen Amanda Todd, Garcia’s death exemplifies a disturbing trend not only in suicide of young girls, but in subsequent media coverage. Both the New York Post and the Daily News claim Garcia had sex with four members of the football team, but do not cite their sources. For such a claim, a bit more than “police sources” is warranted. The New York Post claims Garcia had sex with “four men at once,” they too neglected to include specific sources. They are now reporting Garcia engaged in “an orgy” that was videotaped, according to unnamed sources. Not only is Garcia dead, she is the only one whose identity has been revealed, making the reported sex act all about her participation in it, rather than the subsequent actions of those who may have bullied her to death.

FYI high school boys, if you find a girl who is down with sleeping with even ONE of you, she should be worshiped, not ridiculed. The New York Post described Garcia’s death thusly:

A Tottenville High School student jumped in front of a train after she was bullied for having sex with four football players at the same time during a party after a game this weekend, sources said. [NY Post Lede]

Using the phrase: “bullied for” implies that there was a reason Garcia was bullied, as if she did something wrong. While sleeping with four football players might not be everyone’s cup of tea, there is nothing inherrently “wrong” with it. Surely the football players didn’t think anything was wrong with it at the time. The only newspaper that has done anything close to decent coverage of Garcia’s tragic demise is Staten Island Live, reporting that police are investigating the possibility of a sex tape.

As with the Amanda Todd case, Garcia is being mocked and shamed in death in a manner that is both cruel and indicative of what she may have endured while she was alive:

A screen shot from http://truenewsusa.blogspot.com/2012/10/junior-nympho-15-year-old-felicia.html

While Garcia’s suicide is tragic, and while teens bullying other teens should not be tolerated, what is more upsetting is that adult members of the media are covering this story in a way that perpetuates the idea that female promiscuity is something warranting shame, attack or humiliation. The “she was asking for it” mentality that condones mistreatment of certain women for their perceived lack of values or morals is alive and well in American culture and it needs to be stopped.

Felicia Garcia above, photos from Radar Online.

While we are thrilled to have the traffic, it brings up some really deep philosophical questions about both human nature and the nature of the Internet.

Fake Pretty has essentially become popular on the back of a dead girl. Amanda Todd killed herself after she was stalked and made fun of on the Internet, then tried to reach out to others through the Internet for solace shortly before her suicide. And in death, Amanda Todd has become a meme, figment of the Internet’s imagination, a phenomenon usually reserved for cute photos of cats with bread on their faces or auto-tuned children. In death, the Internet tried to fight for Amanda; the Hacker group known as “Anonymous” released the alleged name of Todd’s initial tormentor so that vigilante justice could be exacted.

On YouTube, people are posting videos of Amanda Todd singing in their feeds so that visitors will click on their streams. Numerous “Amanda Todd” Facebook accounts have appeared and garnered millions of “likes” in her name.

On Twitter, another teenager named Amanda Todd is flummoxed at her new-found popularity. In the midst of defending her identity and vitality, she asks:

Todd has become such a phenomenon that people are wondering if the story is a hoax. Her tale has become, in a word, unreal or symbolic. Parents may tell it to children as a warning: don’t share pictures on the Internet with strangers or this could happen to you! Teenage girls may see it as an essay on the dangers of female promiscuity, curious people just want to see photos.

Watching Amanda Todd’s YouTube videos, she sort of becomes unreal–as if her channel, “TheSomebodyToKnow,” is some newfangled “Blair Witch Project” promo. How could a girl who was this public about her pain (someone who had already attempted suicide once)– how could this girl be so ignored and then so noticed? Who is Amanda Todd? Who was Amanda Todd?

When is the movie coming out?

Perhaps our attempts to fictionalize her or claim ownership of her story stem from disbelief that someone could have cried out in pain so publicly and not have been heard. Or, perhaps as Vancouver Sun’s Pete McMartin writes, our fascination stems from our ability to

 ”… watch a tortured young girl foreshadow her death on the very thing that caused her so much grief. How many of the millions of viewers of Amanda’s video saw the awful irony in that, that the virtual world had become both her outlet and her prison?”

McMartin concludes:

But I can’t help feeling that her video illustrated not only her torment, but contained in it the seed of our own sickness, our own outlet and prison.”

We look at her videos to try and make meaning of a world in which this could happen. Some of us turn into philosophers or youth advocates, others turn into jokers or slut shamers, still more coast apathetically on the crest of Todd’s Internet wave until it too crashes upon the shore.

We are interested in her story because on the Internet, we are all Amanda Todd– anonymous, reaching out, screaming to be heard and hiding at the same time. On the Internet, we are all (as Amanda Todd sang) “outside looking in.”

Need help? In the U.S., call 1-800-273-8255

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline

Never before have I seen child suicides pitted against each other. What could be so polarizing about Todd? The answer came in the form of a video the young Vancouver girl made, shortly before her suicide.

In the over eight-minute-long video, Todd tells viewers that her troubles started when she went on a webcam chat and flashed a guy at his request. The man later found her and made her life hell, causing her to switch schools (the hacker group anonymous released a video today claiming they had discovered who Todd’s initial tormentor was).

Todd then had a fling with a guy who had a girlfriend. The boy she liked came after her, along with his girlfriend and others. She was physically attacked. She publicly claimed the affair was all her fault to protect him. She was so tormented after this misdeed that she drank bleach and started cutting herself. She switched schools, but no one at her old school would forget about her, and they kept posting pictures on Facebook to humiliate her.

Today, less than a week after the 15-year-old’s death by hanging, memes making fun of her for drinking bleach continue to be circulated. The Twitter peanut gallery has turned her death into a lesson for young girls everywhere: if you make a mistake involving your body, even when you die, we won’t care. People are claiming Todd did more than just flash the initial guy, as if that somehow condemns her, they also call her a drug addict, as if that means we should care less.

Frankly it’s disgusting.

Todd is not just a victim of cyberbullying, she is a victim of vicious and violent sexism entrenched in our culture. It’s a force so pervasive, that sometimes the only way out for a young girl is death.

It’s possible Todd thought her death might make people think twice about humiliating girls for their sexual mistakes. Maybe she thought the people who bullied her might feel bad or think twice before treating another young girl this way. However, cultural attitudes towards women are so set in stone that nothing–not even the suicide of a young girl like Todd– can reverse them. In fact, misogynists are taking Todd’s suicide as validation for their misbegotten practice of slut shaming.  Though it is painful to see the world to react to Todd’s suicide in a less than compassionate way, I hope it makes young girls everywhere think twice about taking their own lives. The justice you deserve will only be attained if you live on to fight for it. RIP Amanda Todd. It doesn’t “get better,” we just get better at dealing with it.

*Editors note: Images are screen shots taken from various websites today, Tuesday October 16, 2012.

Images have been modified to prevent their proliferation in an unintended manner.