Thanks.

I mostly avoided reading about Steubenville during the media frenzy and hoped someone would write a narrative of events after the dust settled. This is it. A really sad story where everyone loses.

Some excerpts I want to think more about:

The Internet is uniquely qualified as a venue for public shaming; it is a town square big enough to put all the world’s sinners in the stocks. 

...while the police commandeered phones, interviewed witnesses, and collected physical evidence from the crime scene, readers online relied on collaborative deduction. The story they produced felt archetypally right. The “hacktivists” of Anonymous were modern-day Peter Parkers—computer nerds who put on a costume and were transformed into superhero vigilantes.

Goddard told me, “At the end of the day, nobody’s a winner. Their lives have been ruined across the board, and it started from the very moment those kids made that decision—they became those kids from that school in that town. They can’t ever change that.”

She [Hanlin] said that Goddard had done damage “particularly from a feminist point of view, because, but for her, that young girl would not have endured nearly the exposure that happened throughout the country. What the bloggers did was make sure that five hundred million people saw those pictures of her. I wouldn’t want that picture to be seen by one person.”