If you believe what you read on Twitter, a girl whose name spread around the world in a tweeting frenzy may have killed herself.
For more than three days, Twitter has been captivated by this girl, first spreading rumors that the girl, reportedly 14, was videotaped while performing oral sex on a boy in public, then debating the issue—all the while naming the girl.
Of course, this is Twitter, where rumors often fly faster than the truth. So it’s impossible to know whether any of this—including her suicide—really happened.
But if the girl is real, it’s hard to imagine someone so young being able to handle the barrage of criticism. Other teens facing online harassment have, in fact, taken their lives.
Since late Saturday night, the girl has been mentioned more than 121,000 times, according to Topsy, a social media search engine. That includes more than 500 tweets in the last 24 hours that include her name and the word “suicide.”
(Editor’s note: The Daily Dot has not published the girl’s name because she is a minor and may have been the victim of a sexual assault. Most media outlets do not publish the names of sex-crime victims. While it may seem absurd given the prevalence of the victim’s name, we’re not linking to the videos or the tweets in question, in an effort to spare her further attention.)
Earlier this morning, the hashtag #ifyoudontgivehead was a top trending topic. It, too, featured numerous references to the girl. Despite the ongoing attention she has received on Twitter, her name has not appeared on the site’s Trending Topics list since Monday afternoon.
News of the teenage girl has spread far beyond Twitter. It has spawned dozens of Facebook pages, YouTube reaction videos, and insulting exploitables—those easily reproduced graphics customized with taunting messages popular on message boards like 4chan.
One popular YouTube music video about the girl features the lyrics “…suck it up like a vacuum. Dumb bitch should have done it in a bathroom.” That video, which features five males dancing, rapping, and showing off their tattoos, has been viewed about 16,000 times, has 303 likes and 22 dislikes.
“Don’t criticize somebody for doing what they do when you know you did the same thing,” said two girls in another YouTube video defending the teenager. This video, which also uses the teenagers full name, has been viewed about 1,200 times.
On Monday Twitter said that it was “monitoring reports related to this case and will apply our policy on child pornography.” Twitter hasn’t addressed whether or how that policy applies to tweets or hashtags that mention the teen’s name.
While news of the teenager has gripped every ethnicity, the black Twitter community has been the most vocal. The black community is the largest ethnicity (16 percent) on the micro blogging site after Caucasians (69 percent), according to statistics from Quantcast, a web traffic analysis tool.
Some of these Twitter users have even said that they’ve discussed the video of the girl in class with their college professors and high school teachers.
Photo by Onno B