“We’re addicted to being on Facebook.”
—Jordi Berbera, who runs a pizza stall in Mexico City, tells Rest of World why they wanted to sell their merchandise through the social network instead of more food delivery apps. conventional.
The big story
“Am I going crazy or am I being harassed?” Within the haunting online world of gang harassment
August 2020
Jenny’s story is not linear, as we like stories to be. He was born in Baltimore in 1975 and had a happy, healthy childhood: his younger brother Danny fondly remembers the treasure hunts he would orchestrate. In her late teens, she developed anorexia and depression and was hospitalized for a month. Despite her struggles, she graduated from high school and was accepted into a prestigious liberal arts university.
There, things went down again. Among other issues, chronic fatigue led her to drop out of school. When he was 25 he drove around the Florida Sunshine Skyway Bridge in an apparent suicide attempt. At age 30, after experiencing delusions that she was pregnant, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia. She was hospitalized for half a year and began treatment, regularly receiving injections of an antipsychotic drug. “It was like going back to my older sister,” Danny says.
On July 17, 2017, Jenny jumped from the tenth floor of a parking lot at Tampa International Airport. After his death, his family searched his hotel room and apartment, but the 42-year-old woman left no notes. “We wanted to find a reason why he did this,” Danny says. And so, a week after the death of her sister, Danny, a certified ethical hacker, decided to look for answers on Jenny’s computer. He discovered that he had subscribed to hundreds of gang groups via Facebook, Twitter and Reddit; Online communities where self-proclaimed “targeted individuals” say they are being controlled, harassed, and persecuted by governments and other organizations 24 hours a day, and the Internet legitimizes them. Read the whole story.
