“People hated me so much”

February 23, 2018 4:29 PM

We’ve Always Hated Girls Online: A Wayback Machine Investigation: A former fan searches for a teen girl who was once internet famous for her coding skills

So I think about Sara reading her guestbook, this thing on her website that was supposed to support her, reassure her, and I imagine her sadness, and even more, her anger. Because, reading her diary, that’s what I saw: anger that so many strangers could hate her for being popular because she was good at something, and not just any something. She was good at writing code, at a time when “writing code” was a phrase that almost no one knew and almost no one valued. And you know what? A lot of those guestbook signers were adults. I don’t know this for sure. The guestbook wasn’t archived by WaybackMachine, which is good, because some things maybe shouldn’t be archived. But statistically, realistically? There were probably adults harassing Sara. And I think about her sitting there and reading it and no one being there to see her face, her sadness or anger or whatever she must have felt. Exasperation, maybe.

Maybe it’s good. I suppose most people don’t want to be seen crying. Sometimes it’s best to hide this pain and put on armor and turn away, and turn it off. But when pain is hidden for so long eventually it’s going to find a way out, and slip through some crack like smoke from a house fire, and the whole goddamned thing is going to burn down.

And so to escape the flames you leave land entirely and walk into the sea, down, down, down to where the submarine internet cables are, thousands of feet below, the parts of the ocean where light can barely find you. You follow the cables and imagine the light inside, taking bits by the billions across the earth, and how much of that might be hate, directed toward some little girl. I crossed oceans of data to find Sara, but I couldn’t. She’d been driven from the internet, and into the darkness, under the surface, she vanished.

posted by not_the_water (20 comments total)

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posted by zippy at 5:16 PM on February 23, 2018

“The Internet removes the veneer of humanity from its participants.”
—Mensch
posted by blob at 5:40 PM on February 23, 2018 [10 favorites]

Oh, my heart.

(And that is beautifully written.)
posted by dendritejungle at 5:46 PM on February 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

Shall I assume this missing persons case has forwarded on to the internet detective division at Reply-All?
posted by pwnguin at 6:04 PM on February 23, 2018 [3 favorites]

Sara sounds rad and I really liked this while I was reading it but a lot of the tangents (the obituary, the NY Times article) are plainly wrong and just there for shock value. I can't resist a Google challenge so I found the archived site which indeed has upwards of a million views, and lists a birthdate and has a photo. Then I googled the "Pepsi" line in the obituary-- the birthdate is two months different. How did the author even stumble onto it? Next I googled the NY Times article. It describes girls who were middle schoolers in the spring of 2004. From the birthdate, this girl should have been a high school senior at that time. There is zero chance it's describing her. Plus, the school in the article is a small prep school (if that's even the correct school, since I'm pretty sure Gore's kid was kicked out of someplace else); with a name and photo any random alum from around that time should've been able to identify her. Heck I know three women who were in the grade below who could've probably figured it out if asked.

Being a girl/woman/person on the internet is tough enough without being profiled as a ~missing person~ without permission (when in fact you're probably decently easy to locate) and being the subject of a lot of plainly false "omg maybe she DIED!!!" and "she was bullied so hard the TIMES wrote about it!!!" innuendo. Plus isn't it just as likely that she's doing just fine, seeing as that she was a smart and social kid with plenty of connections/privilege? I wouldn't mind reading her real story.
posted by acidic at 6:45 PM on February 23, 2018 [39 favorites]

Honestly, it's not much of a missing persons case. There are some real specific details in that article: I know where Sara went to school, because that particular politician's kid was only kicked out of one school for smoking pot, and I could probably work my extended network and find Sara. But I'm not going to, because it's kind of creepy and gross to sic an internet mob on someone, even if you mean it in a nice way. Was it necessary to the article to provide so many specific, identifying details?
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:46 PM on February 23, 2018 [13 favorites]

It's probably all for the best that Sara never be found, because then she'll get doxxed and stalked for the rest of her life. For being female and writing an HTML page in the past.
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:55 PM on February 23, 2018 [20 favorites]

I gave up trying to find her, at least for a while. She had wanted to disappear, and she had, and I should leave it at that, and trust that she grew up and left this shit behind and had a normal life. Stop stalking the ghosts of internet girls past. Leave them be. Let them go.

But I’ve never been one to yield to a challenge, or common sense, and, weeks later, late at night, I found myself Googling her again.

This isn't a challenge this person is yielding to. It's a compulsion, and I don't think it's that different than exactly the same thing that leads to all the doxxing--maybe it comes from a better place, absolutely, but you know, I've been down this rabbit hole in the past, myself, almost always late at night and often spurred by medication-related insomnia and obsessive thoughts. This isn't really a story about Sara; this is a story about someone who really needed someone to tell them to go the fuck to sleep and let it go.
posted by Sequence at 7:26 PM on February 23, 2018 [17 favorites]

Mod note: Please don't "what about the men" in here.
posted by Eyebrows McGee (staff) at 8:38 PM on February 23, 2018 [19 favorites]

How very interesting that after reading this article about people feeling compelled to criticize a girl online, that two of the commenters in here felt compelled to criticize the woman who wrote the article.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:59 PM on February 23, 2018 [10 favorites]

Honestly, it's not much of a missing persons case. There are some real specific details in that article: I know where Sara went to school, because that particular politician's kid was only kicked out of one school for smoking pot, and I could probably work my extended network and find Sara. But I'm not going to, because it's kind of creepy and gross to sic an internet mob on someone, even if you mean it in a nice way. Was it necessary to the article to provide so many specific, identifying details?

I found Sara (I'd say, 95% sure it's her) on Facebook in less than five minutes using a couple of the most basic info tidbits from this article.
posted by candyland at 9:06 PM on February 23, 2018 [2 favorites]

I don't think that criticizing the substance of an article is the same as harassing or bullying a kid, and it's sort of bizarre to suggest that articles by women should be exempt from critical analysis.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 9:07 PM on February 23, 2018 [26 favorites]

Argh, wish I'd read Acidic's comment before I shared this piece on social media. My bad.
posted by LarryC at 9:37 PM on February 23, 2018

Still waiting for the day that humanity demonstrates basic humanity. Ok, fine, demonstrates basic humanity to those not in our immediate social circles.
posted by drewbage1847 at 10:03 PM on February 23, 2018 [7 favorites]

I found Sara (I'd say, 95% sure it's her) on Facebook

Is she ok?
I want her to be ok.
posted by chavenet at 3:11 AM on February 24, 2018

Is she ok?
I want her to be ok.

If it's her, she seems to be doing great. And not working in an IT-related field.
posted by candyland at 8:41 AM on February 24, 2018 [2 favorites]

I don't think that criticizing the substance of an article is the same as harassing or bullying a kid, and it's sort of bizarre to suggest that articles by women should be exempt from critical analysis.

There's a big difference between criticizing the substance of the article and comments saying that someone should tell the author to "go the fuck to sleep".
posted by katyggls at 9:40 AM on February 24, 2018 [3 favorites]

I'm saying that from the POV of being the sort of person who DOES that, katyggls, not as a personal criticism. When a writer says "I knew this was a bad idea but I did it anyway," it is not a personal attack to say that yes, in fact, I agree with her, it was a bad idea and she shouldn't have been doing it and I wish other people around her had actually said as much and that nobody had enabled publishing something that was so much spawned by late night bad ideas. The "go the fuck to sleep" part, in particular, though, reflects the sort of thing I'd expect to hear from my own friends when I'm on about something at 2am, not anything with any cruelty, and I'm sorry for that! It's a phrase friends and I have used socially re: this sort of thing so much that I didn't think about how it'd read in this particular context.
posted by Sequence at 10:01 AM on February 24, 2018 [1 favorite]

…when the idea of broadcasting your real name for anyone to see was unthinkable

Okay, I officially feel Old now. This exact thing is why I refuse to use Facebook or Google Whateveritis, never mind spinoffs like WhatsApp. The Internet is a place to be someone else, and reach beyond what my quotidian identity allows. I refuse to consider exposing my private life to the broader universe in this way.
But in this one phrase I am written off as an archaic oddity of the 20th century Internet. Perhaps I have no place online in future. Perhaps we'll claim this back. Somehow I doubt it.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 3:41 PM on February 24, 2018 [5 favorites]

I was online before there was a web, when I socialized on dial-up BBS's and my dad's access to Usenet through work. For quite some time, googling my name turned up posts to rec.arts.comics and not much else. That was only because for a while my usenet access was via a work-related account. Other than that, though, I'd pulled a trick from the feminism of my mother's generation -- if you listed yourself by initials only, then someone looking at a directory could not know for sure you were female and was less likely to make obscene calls. I still do that most places I can get away with it, if I cannot use a pseudonym. After my time came a period when folks were much looser about using their real names, but it seems to me that the generation after that is learning to anonymize themselves a bit more. Snapchat doesn't have the real name requirement that Facebook does, and I suspect that's some small part of the appeal.
posted by Karmakaze at 1:01 PM on February 27, 2018 [2 favorites]