From the Post:
A Web site that catered to anonymous slander and insults by and about teenagers -- and was especially popular in Montgomery County high schools -- was closed down yesterday by its Web hosting company.
The shutdown came several weeks after the Maryland attorney general's office began investigating the site, peoplesdirt.com, which has alarmed parents and school officials for months. It created a wave of concern in mid-May when a former student at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda posted a rambling threat to kill students and staff members. The teen was later arrested.
Whitman Principal Alan Goodwin hailed the demise of a site that "often caused despair for students."
Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler said his office approached advertisers and the Web hosting company, the Go Daddy Group, raising concerns about the nature of the site, which included racial rants, allegations of promiscuity about named high school girls, and scurrilous accusations against named teachers. Nearly all postings were anonymous.
"It was really serving as a slander board -- a slander, defamation Web site for high school students," Gansler said.
He said much of what was on the site was protected by the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech. Although slander and defamation are not protected by law, the comments were posted anonymously, making it difficult to take action.
Thank, folks. This desperately needed to be done.
I went to the site, a while ago, and did more than a bit of reading.
Operated by one Alfredo Castillo, the site was labeled "vile" by almost every public official who encountered it.
I keep asking, how did we, as a society, get to be so fucking crazy?
Now I have to ask if this site is a symptom, or a cause, or both.
From earlier Post coverage:
One Montgomery teenager said he first heard of the Web site when someone told him that he was the subject of a sexually explicit comment. The teen was horrified to read what had been written -- and then said he discovered that other students assumed it was true. "It made me an outcast," he said.
Moving right along, I decided that I could, as it were, kill two birds with one stone.
First, I wanted to get a book to read.
Secondly, I wanted to give a heads-up to the folks at the Aspen Hill Library, and let them know that I'd done a lot of research and had compiled some pretty thorough articles on the Development history of Aspen Hill.
I was there right as it opened, and it wasn't too busy. I was able to get the attention of the man in charge, and pointed him to the website. I invited him and anyone else with an interest to drop on by and take a look, if they find errors or any such thing, feel free to correct them, if anyone has anything to add, please do. After all, it's Wikipedia software which is something probably every librarian knows how to use by now.
Then I went looking for a book.
Sadly, no new George R. R. Martin epic had arrived, or perhaps it was checked out. I love his stuff, both the exceptional "Ring of Fire and Ice" cycle which totally beggars Tolkein's "Middle Earth" trilogy, in terms of plot and characterizations. Mr Martin also has written some exceptionally good dark SF back in his earlier days, a lot of it pretty darned spooky, especially his exceptional "Fevre Dream", which inspired me to write a novel of my own. Okay, I only sold 27 copies. But I digress.
I did find a new Larry Niven novel, Juggler of Worlds, written with one Edward Lerner. I love Larry Niven, who has been rocking my world since I first picked up Ringworld back when I was ten or so. I think I have read everything he's written, several times, except for the book on the shelf and its immediate prequel.
So I picked it up, and went to the checkout line.
And while I was waiting there, the lady in front was having her book checked out. And during that exchange, it struck me as singularly weird that the person behind the counter said to the nice old lady, in a totally conversational voice, "Filthy Dracula", and then carried on as if nothing was unusual in saying that sort of thing.
I mean, the ol' gal was not exactly tan, but that's a bit over the top.
And anyone in officialdom is free to check my recent hearing exam at the Motor Vehicle Administration.
I somehow doubt that this was an auditory hallucination, either; unless those auditory hallucinations automatically are followed by a visual hallucination of a little old lady turning as white as a sheet and gasping as if slapped.
And people wonder why I don't go to the library much anymore.
I realize that the library system is a bit hard up to find people who want to work there for what they pay, but do they have to hire people who are crazy enough to be openly racist against imaginary beings? None of which, I should mention, was actually present at the time.
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