Anonymity and fake identity enabled an adult to torment an adolescent to death

Evidence

Hiding behind the mask of anonymity and a fake identity as a teenage boy, the mother befriended Megan with flirtatious messages, then turned against her, calling her a mean person and a slut. At the height of Megan’s emotional distress over the hideous turn of events, the mother posted an especially hateful message: “Everybody in O’Fallon knows who you are. You are a bad person and everybody hates you. Have a shitty rest of your life. The world would be a better place without you” (Pokin, 2007). A few minutes later, Megan hanged herself. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 293

Categorization

• XREF: Fatal anonymity case parallels the vault’s treatment of how deindividuation/anonymity removes shame barriers, echoing the moral-disengagement mechanism Bandura describes.
• SHARE: Send to anyone teaching internet ethics or the Megan Meier case as a canonical anonymity/deindividuation example when framing offline-online disinhibition.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 293