Facebook page draws police scrutiny for cyberbullying
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It was vicious high school gossip gone digital.
Sometime in the past few days, Pennsylvania State Police said a Facebook user created an online forum on the social networking site titled "Beaver County Hoez."
On it, the anonymous user posted photos of girls and young women from Beaver County and included sexually explicit captions and fictitious accounts of sexual encounters. Many of the girls were labeled "hoez."
State police announced Wednesday they were launching an investigation and that they were working with Facebook to pull the plug on the site. It was removed sometime Wednesday evening, though it was unclear if police intervention prompted that.
For those who were featured on the site, though, it was too late. Word of site spread like wildfire through school hallways, prompting sneers and harassment from classmates, said Raven Blair, a 2010 graduate of Beaver Falls High School.
Ms. Blair, who now attends Penn State-Beaver, said even her college classmates knew about the site.
She took her name tag off at work to fend off inquiries about it.
"Once it's up, it's up," she said. "The damage is done."
In the time the site was up, it was viewed by more than 3,100 users who clicked a thumbs-up icon on the site so they could post messages and share the site with fellow Facebook users.
The site drew hundreds of comments from other Facebook users, many of them juvenile and cruel.
Others posted comments defending the girls and decrying the stories as untrue.
The photos of the girls came from the victims' own Facebook pages. Many of them were idyllic high school portraits of the girls in school apparel and cheerleading uniforms, mugging with their friends and boyfriends.
The captions, written in high school vernacular, were crude and vulgar. The site's anonymous creator, who used the name Beaver County Hoez, at one point turned the taunts on those who stood up for the victims.
"why are you such a whore defender?" the user posted.
First Published February 24, 2011 12:00 am
