Free Trial by Fury: Internet Savagery and the Amanda Knox Case by Douglas Preston Page B

on April 23, 2013.
    I felt like I had to become involved.
    My first foray into a public discussion of the case was in an interview with the journalist Candace Dempsey, who wrote a blog hosted by seattlepi.com, the website of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper. Dempsey had been the first journalist to raise questions about the case against Knox. She warned me ahead of time that I would be attacked by anti-Amanda bloggers. I confidently assured her that, as a novelist and journalist for thirty years, I was fully hardened against bad reviews and negative comments. She posted the interview on February 8, 2008, in which I told of my own experience with Mignini and said I thought Amanda and Raffaele were innocent. It was a mild interview in what I assumed to be a rather obscure corner of the Web.
    Then the comments poured in. I was stunned at their ferociousness against Amanda. But what surprised me even more were the blazing personal attacks against me. The commentators had researched me on the Web and extracted personal details I had no idea were there. They threw back at me my own biography, twisted beyond recognition, along with quotes from bad reviews of my books and ugly references to my family. They claimed that my interest in Amanda was sexual. They said I was mentally ill. They said I was a racist. Dempsey deleted the offensive postings and locked her blog at night, which only aroused the bloggers more and sent them seeking other sites to vent their fury.
    Like a damned fool I waded into the fray, posting in the comments section, defending myself, attacking my attackers, and countering their criticisms. I had my name on a Google alert, and the alerts began pouring in, directing me to attacks appearing elsewhere. I found myself swept up in the drama, obsessively checking the Web multiple times a day, outraged and panicked that the accusations, especially the sexual ones, would remain on the Web forever, read by my children and unborn grandchildren. I had to answer each one, get my licks in, set the record straight; but the more I fought, the more the tide of vituperation came back at me. I felt like Cuchulain trying to turn back the sea with his sword. For days I was in a frenzy.
    Finally, I came to my senses. I couldn’t believe that I had gotten sucked in and become almost as crazy as they were. But it made me wonder: Who are these people? And why would so many people, unconnected with either the victim or the accused, with no skin in the game, devote their time and energy to seeing this girl punished — and to vilifying all those who came to her defense? One could understand the single-minded fervor of Amanda’s family and friends in defending her. And one could appreciate the passion those who thought she was innocent and sought to correct a terrible injustice. But why the white-hot zeal from apparently random people to see her punished ? There was no equivalence between Amanda’s defenders and her persecutors. The former were engaged in normal human behavior, the latter in something that felt pathological.
    When you ask Web sophisticates why people are so vicious on the Internet, you get a set of stock responses. The very question is naïve. What do you expect? The world is full of angry people who don’t have a life. The Web offers a perfect outlet where they can be anonymous, important, and powerful, and attack others without fear of retribution. The Web has given them a voice when before they had none. These are people who find meaning in their lives by connecting with similar people on the net, who seek a sense of purpose and fulfillment online that they can’t achieve in the real world. Finally, the nature of the Internet, we are told, is also to blame — it’s a place where the human id runs amok, it’s a playground for disturbed people, it’s an echo chamber for the uninformed. We are advised that Internet nastiness is white noise, best ignored. It has little effect in the real world.
    While many