Out of morbid curiosity, I clicked over to Freeperville to see what their reactions are to the whole Foley scandal. As expected, I found comment threads that ranged from the ridiculous to the delusional.
Then I came across something truly evil. They outed the boy who was the recipient of Foley's suggestive emails, posting his name and other personal info.
More after the jump.
Essentially, an enterprising freeper searched the kid's email username at other popular sites, and came across a myspace page. From that, (s)he found his name and date of birth and posted them, as well as a link to his myspace page (with a link to the Google-cached copy for posterity, of course). That same poster also copied a personal letter from another of the boy's web pages, apparently to his mother, about his experience as a Congressional page (though no mention of Foley). There are links to the original source of that letter, and claims that there's much more content where it came from.
The thread that all this is posted on is here. I'm not going to glorify this outing by posting to the individual entries, let alone the kid's pages. The young man and his family obviously just wanted to be left alone. He was concerned enough to alert Congressional staffers. His family told Rep. Alexander they didn't want him to do anything. And though the page told the St. Petersburg Times about the emails last November, they didn't publish them until the story broke elsewhere, presumably at the family's request.
What's especially ironic about the Freepers' outing of the page is that he's one of their own. From the content of his letter and myspace page, you'd easily conclude that this kid will grow up to be a conservative Republican. Don't think that the Freeper who posted all this info had benevolent motives, either: (S)he also posted many comments calling into question the IM transcripts based on timestamps and such, trying to Ratherize the whole affair. And (s)he later commented,
...he'll secure a mega $,$$$,$$$ book deal and live happily ever after.
And how do the other freepers respond?
I hate to pass judgement from just a picture, but, that young man looks as queer as a three dollar bill.
I just hope this young man and his family can weather the coming onslaught of publicity with their dignity intact. But from what I've seen so far, I'm not too hopeful.
Update: I should add that the original reporting (from ABC?) was careless in leaving the page's email address visible, though this certainly doesn't excuse the outing.