AMERICA: Some internet social networking sites can seriously damage your mental health, writes Denis Staunton
FRUSTRATED AFTER numerous attempts to put her three-year-old daughter to bed last Sunday evening, a Los Angeles mother vented on the internet, messaging other mothers on a social networking site.
"If I smother my three-year- old, who will NOT GO TO F****** SLEEP, is it REALLY a crime?" she said.
The woman, who blogs as Thordora, was using Twitter, a microblogging system that allows users to send and respond to short messages no more than 140 characters long. Thordora's tweet set off a flurry among other twitterers, prompting one woman to alert the network's staff, who sent the police around to the woman's home.
"Just had to prove that my f****** daughter was all right because some 'person' who has never met me, barely exchanged any words with me, couldn't stop for a minute and think, gee, perhaps she's like many other mothers, annoyed at bedtime. She couldn't stop and think, hmmm, an e-mail might suffice," Thordora wrote later in a blog post headlined "Watch What
You Twitter, Big Sister Is
Watching".
"Oh no, not our saviour. Only the cops will do. Only the cops at 11pm, where I had to open the f****** door to their room as they SLEPT to prove I hadn't harmed them."
Many of Thordora's fellow bloggers were sympathetic, suggesting that the remark that triggered the police visit was a harmless example of the kind of dark humour shared by many mothers.
However, the woman who alerted the authorities insisted that she was acting as any responsible person should to avert a possible threat to a defenceless child.
"As you said, we hardly know each other and I had no way to know if you were serious or joking. You made the statement and I did what I thought was right in the situation by calling attention to it," the woman wrote, blogging as Tara.
"I am sorry that you were frustrated with your child and I'm sorry that you think it's okay to joke about killing your children. I don't."
The incident has revived a debate about social responsibility on the internet, where social networking sites have generated millions of friendships among people who know each other's most intimate thoughts, but have never met in person and in many cases, don't know one another's real names.
Last November, Abraham Briggs (19) from Florida took his own life with a combination of prescription drugs while 1,500 people watched on streaming video.
Briggs, who suffered from bipolar disorder, had threatened suicide a number of times on a bodybuilding chat forum, but nobody took the threats seriously.
"I have let everyone down and I feel as though I will never change or never improve. I am in love with a girl and I know that I am not good enough for her," he wrote in a suicide note posted before he took the pills that killed him.
"I have reached out for help so many times and yet, I believe, I was turned away because of the things I did, that it is a punishment I am willing to take, for I know that being who I am has only brought myself and others pain."
As Briggs lay dying, some of those watching posted abusive comments. Other bloggers egged him on and he had been dead for several hours before a viewer contacted the police, who broke down his door while the webcam was still running.
"I think that after this incident, and probably other incidents that have occurred in the past, they all point to some kind of regulation is necessary," the dead teenager's father said later.
"I think this is wrong to have this happen for hours without any action being taken by the people in charge. Where were they all the time?
Website moderators say they cannot control every word exchanged among users, while others point out that social networking sites and online forums can offer valuable support to people too shy or isolated to reach out to physical communities.
Ayelet Waldman, a writer who, like Briggs, suffers from bipolar disorder, believes an online friend may have saved her life when she wrote on her blog that she was feeling suicidal.
"Within hours of my scary blog post, a woman whom I'd met and become friends with online read it, called me and refused to hang up until I telephoned my psychiatrist," Waldman wrote last month.
"Just as we are all implicated in the dark side of the technology that allowed Mr Briggs to commit suicide in front of so large and callous an audience, so can we take a certain comfort in the way that very technology has given us new opportunities to reach out, to connect. Both of these are true."