Online harassment, real harm: Fixing the Web’s biggest bug

Tina Meier, founder of the Megan Meier Foundation, poses for a photo in the foundation’s office in St. Charles, Missouri. Meier’s daughter, Megan, committed suicide in 2007 at the age of 13 after being harassed by a ‘friend’ on MySpace who later turned out to be the mother of a classmate who was using the fake account to bully the unsuspecting teen. — AP

PROVIDENCE, Rhode Island: It should have been a time of celebration: Brittan Heller would soon graduate from college and head to one of the US’s top law programmes.

But when a classmate with unrequited feelings for Heller wasn’t admitted to that same school, he turned his rage on her. He wrote a manifesto titled “A Stupid B---h to Attend Yale Law School” and posted it on a site popular with anonymous trolls. The man urged them to do their worst.