Cruelty, cowardice in an online world

Parents who felt relieved by the study released this week showing that long hours trolling the Internet can actually improve the social skills of teens might also consider the murkier message being delivered now in a Los Angeles courtroom.

The study suggests that online social networks help kids learn to manage relationships, and create a safe space for the “geeks, freaks, musicians, artists, dorks . . . who generally exist at the margin of teen social worlds.”

But the trial unfolding in U.S. District Court offers a chilling rebuke.

The backdrop is the story of 13-year-old Megan Meier, who hung herself in her bedroom closet in suburban St. Louis two years ago. Megan was distraught over online taunts from a boy she liked, and the fierce way friends turned against her in an insult-laced cyber-free-for-all.

She died without knowing that the boy wasn’t real.

His profile and MySpace page had been concocted, prosecutors allege, by the mother of a neighborhood girl who wanted to find out if Megan was gossiping about her daughter.

That woman, Lori Drew, is on trial now, accused of providing false information to set up the MySpace account, and using it to “inflict emotional distress.” If convicted, she faces up to 20 years in federal prison.

But it’s not just about Lori Drew’s hard heart. The daily chats between Megan and “Josh” apparently became a source of amusement in the neighborhood, among girls Megan had grown up with.

The girls signed on and pretended to be Josh, wooing Megan -- an overweight, unhappy middle-schooler. Then “Josh” dumped her when she fell for him.

Those are “social skills” our kids can do without.

In legal terms, the trial is an interesting real-world clash between free speech and cyber safeguards. But I found it hard to watch Megan’s grieving mother have to explain why she let her daughter have a MySpace page.

The study I get. It reflects parents’ real-world angst over being locked out of an online world that has become a “primary institution of peer culture” for teenagers.

Their reliance on the Internet as social conduit has done more than turn “friending” into a verb and spawn a shorthand of abbreviated words.

Now, “romance” is available to kids not old enough to be out past dark. And once private courtships and feuds have morphed into public displays, drawing instant online commentary from an audience accustomed to the dazzle of music videos and the callousness of TV reality shows.

Forget the tearful phone call or “Dear John” letter. Now, you know that you’ve been dumped when his Facebook status changes to “single” or she blocks you on her MySpace page.

The study calls it “digital housecleaning.”

I call it cowardly and cruel. That’s the problem -- we’re applying our old standards to their new world. As the study points out, our children are “developing ‘social norms’ that their elders may not recognize.”

The online bashing that upended Megan wasn’t just “everybody electronically yelling at everybody else,” as the defense lawyer characterized it Thursday.

It was, as Megan’s mother said in court, insults flashing across the screen at lightening speed -- you’re a fat ass, a whore, everybody knows it -- and going out as “bulletins to hundreds and hundreds of people.”

Megan’s parents knew enough to monitor their daughter’s Internet use. The teen didn’t know the password to her MySpace account, and could use it only when a parent was present.

But they didn’t know what to do when things turned ugly.

Megan’s dad told her not to worry about what people were saying -- the kind of advice I’ve given my daughters. Megan’s mother scolded her for using foul language in responding back. I, too, have done that.

“In hindsight,” Tina Meier said from the witness stand, “there are a lot of things I wish I could have done.”

But she didn’t understand the power of an online bare-knuckle brawl.

Even without computers, teenagers can be unspeakably cruel. Just last month, a 14-year-old boy who had been bullied at his Acton high school shot himself to death in a school bathroom. Earlier in the day, other boys had thrown chili on him in the lunch line and pulled his pants down, his father said.

But the Internet ups the ante, giving people the protection of anonymity and the chance to lob grenades from their computer chair without having to look their target in the eye and see the damage.

Still, I agree with the study’s finding: We can’t protect our children by standing guard. In fact, we do them a disservice if we try to lock them out of the “common culture” in this increasingly technological world.

But we ought to pay more attention to how it all works because the public nature of their online world makes the lessons they learn and mistakes they make more consequential than they were in my day.

My daughters survived their own online crisis when they were about Megan’s age -- but that was a generation ago in computer years. Now online access is so pervasive there are even more ways to hurt yourself and others.

As my girls got older, I learned to trust them to navigate. I’ve never been on Facebook or even seen their MySpace pages.

That’s about to change.

Warning to my daughters: Get ready to “friend” me. Because Mom feels the need to have a Facebook page.

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sandy.banks@latimes.com