Rehtaeh Parsons

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The hacktivist group, Anonymous, is known for vigilante justice—or hooliganism, depending on who you ask—but its role in the enormous public backlash to Nova Scotia teen Rehtaeh Parsons’ tragic death last week is not so black and white. When Amanda Todd took her own life after merciless cyber-bullying last year, Anonymous implicated B.C. resident Kody Maxson — later widely reported to be the wrong man. Maxson says he received over 50 death threats after the hacktivist group spread his name around the web, accusing him of tormenting Todd.

This time around, however, Anonymous appears more strategic, probably because whomever wears the mask in Nova Scotia is not the same person(s) who slandered Maxson in British Columbia. This Anonymous hasn’t used vigilante justice to expose Parsons’ alleged rapists. It’s used the threat of vigilante justice to move the authorities to action. If the RCMP doesn’t act fast, in other words, Anonymous claims it will release the names of Parsons’ alleged rapists. [Editor’s note: RCMP have since announced that they have reopened their investigation.] The group says it has obtained an actual confession from one of the boys involved in the alleged rape. Excerpts from the group’s most recent statement, below:

  A 17-year-old girl killed herself because the police failed to do their jobs…

No one dies anymore without leaving a little of themselves behind—in this case, on Twitter. The picture Rehtaeh left of herself in the last few months of her life (which includes a snapshot of a report card) may not be the one her parents or her self-appointed postmortem defenders would make, and who knows how faithful it might be to the broad sweep of her life. Probably not very. But it is a picture she assembled for the consumption of others, piece by piece; and her desperate deflection of darkening spirits by means of gangsta bravado, humour, and idealism is heartbreaking. I will leave it to the reader to treat this as forensic data and imagine possible implications for some revenge project or other. Such a thing might or might not be warranted; she hasn’t left us any clues here.

‘For the love of God do something,’ Glen Canning writes