TRIAL BY FURY

Internet Savagery and the Amanda Knox Case

By Douglas Preston

The bitch needs to die naked tasting her own blood.

Your daughter will come out of prison a hard nosed lesbian (with her sex drive)I hope you are dead before that happens I really do. Meredith Kercher is dead and you dont give a shit about her or her family. But you are the victims arent you? Rot in hell.

And Raffaele? He’s such the pervert he needs to be locked away for life. … Raffaele was perfect for Amanda infusing the sort of wicked and wonderful temptation of evilness that comes with pranks and mutual masturbation. They know nothing of love and compassion but only of spontaneous and twisted self gratification.

There are a whole lot of women who instinctively think she is a total fake, has not fooled any one of us, believes she is foul to the bone and we hope she rots in prison and dies in hell.

I hope Knox stays in jail where she is safe feom me and others like me because if she ever makes it home to Seattle she will suffer that same fate as her victim. None of you can stop me either.

On November 2, 2007, in the ancient and lovely hill town of Perugia, Italy, a British girl named Meredith Kercher was found murdered in the cottage she shared with several other students. Her half-naked body lay on the floor of the bedroom, covered by a duvet; her throat had been stabbed, and there were signs of sexual assault and robbery. It was one of the most brutal murders in Perugia in more than thirty years, and it made front-page news in Italy. Four days later, police and prosecutors held a triumphant press conference in Perugia, in which they proclaimed that they had solved the case and arrested the killers. “Case closed,” they announced. Among the three alleged killers was a twenty-year-old college student from Seattle named Amanda Knox and her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito. The ensuing investigation, trial, conviction, and appeal of Amanda and Raffaele lasted 1,428 days and became one of the most sensational murder trials of the new century. On October 3, 2011, an appeals court in Perugia declared them innocent. Amanda went back to her family in Seattle and Raffaele to his in Bari. On March 26, 2013, Italy’s Court of Cassation vacated the acquittal and ordered a retrial on points of law as yet unspecified. The retrial may well involve more years of appeals and reviews. Amanda was arrested when she was twenty; she could be thirty by the time her case is finally resolved.

Within days of Amanda’s arrest, public opinion began lining up on either side. It eventually coalesced into two groups, the so-called “Guilters” and the “Innocentisti,” anti-Amanda and pro-Amanda bloggers. These two groups have been brawling online ever since. People sometimes note the transient, ever-changing nature of the Web, but in fact the opposite is true. The Web is a gigantic tar pit that traps and fossilizes every electron that ventures within. On March 29, 2013, as I was putting the final touches on this article, I conducted an experiment. I Googled “Amanda Knox” and got 7.1 million hits. I then tried “Amanda Knox” and “bitch,” which returned 1.7 million hits. “Amanda Knox” and “pervert” came back at 880,000 hits, and her name coupled with “slut” yielded 380,000. “Amanda Knox” and “innocent” returned 482,000. The quotations that opened this article were gathered in about fifteen minutes of surfing. There are millions of similar comments about Amanda like this, and most of them will survive in digital form for a long time — perhaps, given Web archiving efforts, close to forever. Amanda’s great-great-grandchildren may find that this ugly archive is only a few clicks away.

The extreme viciousness of the anti-Amanda commentariage is startling. There are countless statements calling for the murdering, raping, torturing, throat-cutting, frying, hanging, electrocution, burning, and rotting in hell of Amanda, along with her sisters, family, friends, and supporters. This silicon Inquisition is still there in all its glory, undiminished by time.

Which brings me to the question: why did the Knox case arouse such a furor on the Web? And this leads to an even more interesting problem: Why are there so many savage, crazy, vicious, and angry people on the Internet? The answer, which might appear obvious on the surface, is in fact anything but clear. Recent controversial research into the evolution of altruism, warfare, and punishment in human society indicates that Internet savagery may be programmed into our very genes.

* * *

I was drawn into the case by accident. Amanda’s chief prosecutor was Giuliano Mignini, a man I knew well. In 2000 I moved to Italy with my family to write a murder mystery set in Florence. We settled in a fifteenth-century farmhouse in the Florentine hills. I soon learned that the picturesque olive grove outside our door had been the scene of a horrific double homicide in 1983, committed by a serial killer known only as the Monster of Florence. Between 1974 and 1985, the Monster killed young people making love in cars in the Florentine hills and performed a ritualistic mutilation to the woman’s body. He had never been identified, and the case, one of the longest and most expensive criminal investigations in Italian history, had never been solved. The Monster was so depraved, and so skilled at murder, that he made Jack the Ripper look like Mister Rogers. I became interested and dropped the idea of the novel to write a book about the Monster case instead. I teamed up with the Italian journalist, Mario Spezi, who had covered the Monster’s killings for the local paper from the beginning, and knew more about the case than even the police.

Giuliano Mignini did not like our investigation. It went against his theories that a Satanic cult was responsible for the Monster killings — despite clear forensic evidence that all fourteen victims had been killed by a lone individual. He launched a secret investigation of us, tapped our cellphones, and bugged Spezi’s car. He had the police seize Spezi’s computer and all our notes, research, and files on the case. The police then picked me up on the streets of Florence and hauled me in before Mignini, where he interrogated me for hours, with no attorney or interpreter present. He demanded I confess to a string of crimes, including being an accessory to murder, and when I refused, he indicted me for perjury and obstruction of justice and suggested I leave the country. Spezi fared worse, much worse. Mignini ordered him arrested and accused him of being a member of the Satanic sect that conducted the Monster killings. Spezi was thrown into the same prison in which Amanda Knox would later be incarcerated. Spezi remained jailed until an international uproar, led by the Committee to Protect Journalists, forced his release. Together Mario and I published bestselling book about the case, The Monster of Florence, which is now being made into a movie starring George Clooney. (The Italian courts dismissed all charges against us; Mignini was indicted and convicted for abuse of office, the conviction later suspended on a technicality.)

A few days after Amanda Knox was arrested for murder, I got a call from a man named Tom Wright, a former Hollywood executive and well-known filmmaker. His powerful voice, full of desperation and breaking at times, came booming down the wire. He explained that his daughter and Amanda were high school friends and schoolmates. He knew her family. It was impossible that Amanda could be a murderer. He had heard about our book and, seeing that Spezi and I had also been victims of Mignini, begged us for help.

I wasn’t sure about Amanda’s innocence at the time, but when I looked into the case, I was shocked. Mignini and the Perugian police were railroading Amanda and Raffaele for a murder they did not commit. Spezi and I later learned why she had been framed, which we detailed in a new afterword to The Monster of Florence, published 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 these explanations are undoubtedly true, none go deep enough. None explain why the Web is a place where some human beings devote enormous effort to attacking strangers who have done nothing to them personally.

Zeynep Tufekci is a sociologist of the Internet who writes a blog called Technosociology. She is a fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University and an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina. Her interests include the formation of social groups on the Internet.

Tufekci was familiar in general terms with the Amanda Knox case but not with the Internet furor. It didn’t surprise her. “At first,” she said, “It may look like an unstructured mob. But when you trace it back, there’s a place where they coalesced. There’s a community aspect to the swarming.” She explained that it is the forming of the community that makes it formidable, effective, and long lasting. These are not anonymous crazies blogging alone in the dead of night. “They’ve invested in becoming a community.” Without that community, she said, they probably wouldn’t be able to sustain their activities.

But who are these people? While we were talking, Tufekci Googled around and noted the crude, sexual nature of much of the anti-Amanda commentary — from both male and female commentators. “This mob congregating on one person so viciously,” she said, “could have a variety of motives. It might be a coalition of female-on-female competition and sexually interested males.” They may have unexamined motives for wanting to see Amanda punished. “The Internet has given these punishers sudden access to a certain kind of power, and they are not fully connected to their victims. There is a disinhibition that comes from being online. This constant refrain that the Internet is just the Internet, that it’s not real — this helps dissociate people from their actions. In people’s minds, it gets construed as unreal space where you’re not morally accountable. But of course this is nonsense. The Internet is very real. We’re social animals. It has a powerful effect in the world.” She suggested I look back in time and trace the development of the anti-Amanda blogosphere.

In the first few weeks after her arrest, the anti-Amanda comments seemed random and inchoate. But as time passed, a more organized movement developed. The anti-Amanda bloggers coalesced and created two websites, “Perugia Murder File” (which later split into two after a dispute, with extensions .net and .org) and “True Justice for Meredith Kercher.”

Not all the bloggers at these sites appeared to fit the stereotype of losers who needed to get a life. Many appeared educated and intelligent. They wrote well. They were articulate. They were effective. They seemed to have friends and jobs. And they were utterly and completely obsessed. The chief moderator of “Perugia Murder File,” Skeptical Bystander, according to statistics on her profile, has blogged about Amanda Knox an average of seven times per day, every day, for the past five years. The creator of “True Justice,” Peter Quennell (the only anti-Amanda blogger to use his real name), wrote over eight hundred detailed articles about the case in addition to posting more than two thousand comments. His writings add up to more words than the Bible, War and Peace, Finnegans Wake, and the Iliad and Odyssey combined. Five and a half years later, all three of these websites are still going strong, especially after the March 26 verdict requiring that Knox be retried. These people, who saw their cause apparently lost with her acquittal in 2011, acquired a new lease on life with the verdict. They are ecstatic and have come roaring back, angrier than ever.

Almost from the beginning, the “True Justice” site became a clearinghouse of anti-Amanda fervor. It would eventually mushroom into a website receiving millions of hits. It specialized in long, detailed articles with bulleted points, footnotes, diagrams, and photographs, which dissected and evaluated every aspect of the case. There were analyses of the crime, the trial proceedings, the cast of characters, and the scientific evidence. There were gigabytes of PowerPoint presentations. The website opened files on people connected with the case, and it paid especial attention to Amanda’s defenders, researching their backgrounds and raising questions about their motives, honesty, and qualifications.

The website wasn’t entirely negative. It praised the integrity, incorruptibility, and perspicacity of Italian police and prosecutors. A particular hero of the site was Giuliano Mignini. The website’s pages were garlanded with pictures of Meredith Kercher, and it featured articles about her life, condolences to her family, and expressions of mourning for the loss to the world by her death. It should be noted that Meredith Kercher was, by all accounts, a remarkable person, her death a terrible loss.

The tone of the site was one of measured outrage. The many articles with their masses of detail created a believable alternate reality. This reality painted a picture of Amanda Knox as a sexual predator, drug addict, and killer, whose beautiful face was a mask covering sexual depravity. She was the product of a dysfunctional and possibly incestuous family. In this alternate reality, her younger sisters (one was 12) dressed provocatively and sexually, and they showed clear signs of psychopathology; if not placed in foster care they, too, might become killers. The “murderess” (the feminizing of the word was standard) was supported by a cast of “carpetbaggers” — that is, opportunistic lawyers, money-grubbing journalists (like me), glory-seeking FBI agents, corrupt judges, narcissistic criminologists and unqualified forensic scientists, all of whom were “wading in the blood of a murdered girl” for fame and money. “True Justice” detailed how Amanda’s family had hired an expensive, multi-tentacled PR firm, which had managed to mislead the national media, including the four national television networks and The New York Times. Dissenting posters at “True Justice” were banned and their opinions removed.

A person who knew nothing of the actual facts of the case might well have found the “True Justice” website to be informative, believable, and consistent. And there were many people out there who did not know the facts. “True Justice” over time would be consulted and used as a source by some major news organizations, most notably the BBC and Newsweek/The Daily Beast.

The online furor was not just white noise. It drove public opinion against Amanda. It influenced coverage by legitimate journalists. For example, Barbie Nadeau, a Rome-based correspondent who covered the case for The Daily Beast, wrote a book about the case, Angel Face: The True Story of Student Killer Amanda Knox. While the book included no footnotes or bibliography, it appears to have used information sourced from anonymous bloggers — identifiable as such because it was incorrect. Tina Brown, editor-in-chief of Newsweek/The Daily Beast, contributed the foreword to the book. In it, Brown wrote that “a merciless culture of sex, drugs, and alcohol” led to Amanda’s “descent into evil,” and she wondered if Amanda’s “pretty face” was perhaps only a “mask, a duplicitous cover for a depraved soul.” To see statements like these come from pen of the editor-in-chief of Newsweek shows how deeply the noise of the blogosphere had penetrated legitimate journalism. Tina Brown was joined by other media personalities who appeared to have gotten much of their information from anti-Amanda online commentary. Ann Coulter wrote that, “Despite liberals’ desperate need for Europeans to like them, the American media have enraged the entire nation of Italy with their bald-faced lies about a heinous murder in Perugia committed by a fresh-faced American girl, Amanda Knox.”

For this piece, I interviewed as many of the dedicated anti-Amanda bloggers as I could get to correspond with me. I asked them what in particular had drawn them to the case. While I received staggeringly long replies, emails running to many thousands of words, not one was able to articulate the source of his or her passion, beyond general statements about victim’s rights, wanting to see justice done, or seeking to protect our children from murderers. Skeptical Bystander told me she was originally drawn to the case because she saw a photo of Amanda Knox, mistook it for the victim, and thought, “gee, she looks more like a killer than a victim.” Their level of self-awareness seemed in inverse proportion to their level of outrage.

The online furor against Amanda spilled over into the real world, dramatically confirmed by what happened to Steve Moore, a much-decorated former career agent with the FBI. Becoming a special agent at 25, Moore had served as a counterterrorist specialist, certified sniper, and helicopter pilot. He participated in covert operations against the Aryan Nations and other white supremacist groups, and he ran the FBI unit responsible for investigating acts of terrorism against the United States in Asia and Pakistan. He retired from the FBI in 2008 and took a job as deputy director of security for Pepperdine University, in Malibu, California. A handsome, rumpled man, he was known for being funny, self-deprecating, blunt-talking, and extremely stubborn.

After retiring, he was bored. In late November 2009, his wife, Michelle, was watching a CBS News report about Amanda Knox and asked him to come over and take a look — that it seemed an innocent American girl was being railroaded in Italy for a murder she didn’t commit.

“I dismissed it,” Moore told me. “I told her that those people are invariably guilty.”

Michelle persisted. “Show me where this report’s wrong.”

Steve went online and started looking at the case. “Right away,” he said, “I found serious, damning problems with each major piece of evidence. … The further I dug, the more it became obvious to me that it was absolutely a fabrication. Later, when I finally got hold of the crime scene tapes, I realized it wasn’t an accident: It was intentional. This was an intentional frame.”

At first, Moore did nothing. Amanda and Raffaele’s trial was almost over and the verdict would be announced in a few weeks. He was sure they would be acquitted. “In the U.S.,” he said, “you don’t get evidence into court unless it’s totally unimpeachable. I thought Italy must be like the U.S. There was no evidence again Amanda.”

On December 5, 2009, they were convicted of murder. “I had to go home from work I was so shocked,” he said. “My ears were ringing. I realized I couldn’t sit idly by.” As a former FBI agent, he was in a position, he hoped, to do something. He went to the administration of Pepperdine and received verbal and written permission to advocate on Amanda’s behalf.

Moore delved into the case, researching it in depth. When he was ready to go public, he made a splash. On September 2, 2010, he appeared on three shows on the same day — The Today show with Ann Curry, Good Morning America with George Stephanopoulos, and the CBS Early Show with Harry Smith. He told Stephanopoulos that the evidence against Amanda was “ridiculous,” Italian forensic techniques “horrible,” and her interrogation “Third World.” He said, “I am as certain of her innocence as I am of anything in the world.”

Moore was devastatingly effective. The three main anti-Amanda websites went incandescent.

“I’m used to people not liking me,” Moore said. “I’ve had murderers threaten me. The Aryan Nations posted on their website that I was on their list, that I was an enemy to my race. I went up against Al Qaeda in Pakistan. But this was beyond belief. I’d never experienced anything like it. Even the murderers I put away didn’t fight me as hard as these nutcases over at PMF and TJMK.”

The posts attacked Moore, ridiculed and mocked his Christian faith, called him a pedophile, a white supremacist, a liar, and a fool. They accused him of molesting his daughters. His oldest daughter received menacing phone calls. Michelle, Steve’s wife, became a particular object of attack. “Michelle was the recipient of some of the most vicious, nasty stuff, some of them saying ‘I long to do to you what they did to Meredith, only it won’t be as nice,’ telling her she needed to be raped.” Someone sent her pornography. The discussion about Moore on the three anti-Amanda websites ran to hundreds of posts. “True Justice” opened a separate file on Moore in its “Carpetbaggers” section.

Skeptical Bystander got the ball rolling at her website, PMF:

My bullshit detector is on high alert! … When I was a kid, my mom would threaten to wash our mouths out with soap if we lied or swore. Next time Steve is on television, he’ll probably have soap bubbles seeping from every orifice.

GEEZ Skep! Give a body a warning, would ya? I’d rather not even think about Skeevie, let alone his orifices. He’s a walking, talking orifice.

he pretends to be on a crusade to save the Holy Land of Amanda, who’s just another drunken immoral college kid like the ones he despises at Pepperdine, except she’s a million times worse! Oh, but she’s young, she's hot, she’s got blue eyes, she’s sexy, so he lost it. He’s a real Jekyll-Hyde and so is his wife, she drove him to this insanity…

Pepperdine immediately became aware of the online furor. Moore returned on September 3 to a “firestorm” at the University. Officials there had been following the posts at “Perugia Murder File,” “True Justice,” and elsewhere, and they were troubled. Ten days later, Moore got a letter from the administration, which demanded that he stop advocating for Amanda. Their reasons were, in part, that they were concerned about “the threat to the University’s reputation as some begin to question your investigation, your qualifications as an expert in this matter, and your motives.” The “some” could only refer to the blogosphere, as only anonymous bloggers had raised these questions. (The regular media had received Moore cordially and treated him as the expert he clearly was.)

“I was gobsmacked,” Moore said. “Stunned. In shock. It wasn’t just the vicious, malevolent and defamatory criticism by PMF/TJMK … it was that some sophisticated people believed their garbage. That’s the danger with these types of Internet trolls; if they use the right verbiage, callow people will believe it.”

Moore felt too strongly about the Knox case to abandon it. Pepperdine fired him. The bloggers went wild with jubilation.

There was no doubt that his suicide mission would fail … He is just another Knox agent in a long line of very ordinary sock puppets and he will not be the last one who will ruin him/herself for the murderess.

Moore would seem to be the sacrificial moron … Go get him, Mignini

I am glad another murderer sympathizer is getting what he deserves. He will not be the last one. More research is been done to make sure.

Moore sued Pepperdine for wrongful termination. Pepperdine settled for a “mutually satisfactory” sum. When I asked Moore what “mutually satisfactory” meant, he said, dryly, “I think I might say I was very satisfied with the settlement.”

“I feel like I have a purpose in life now that I didn’t have before,” he said. “I see injustice out there. And who is better to help right injustice than someone who knows how the justice system works?”

The blogosphere didn’t forget. For the past four years, Moore has been pilloried online. Even today, he and his family are contending with vicious, anonymous attacks. In November 2012, a blogger named BRMull went to Moore’s daughter’s website, copied some of her songs to “Perugia Murder File,” and critiqued them. He appended a threatening message: “yes Steve Moore, I’m talking about your daughter, BRMull plays for keeps.”

Moore said, incredulously: “And I haven’t done anything to them!”

During this time, a different sort of affray took place at Wikipedia. In April 2010, a group of Wikipedia editors, some with high administrator status, replaced the rather thin article entitled “The Murder of Meredith Kercher,” with a new one. The new article, dressed up in the usual objective language of the site, was, in the view of other Wikipedia editors, strongly biased against Amanda. But when these editors tried to add balancing information to the article, the anti-Amanda editors swiftly removed the edits, saying the material was based on unreliable sources. Among the sources they deemed unreliable were CBS News, U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell, criminologist Paul Ciolino, Vanity Fair reporter Judy Bachrach, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Timothy Egan. At least two of the Wikipedia editors posted diatribes against Amanda on anti-Amanda websites under their Wikipedia user names, calling into question their neutrality. One such editor was the same BRMull who threatened Steve Moore’s daughter; BRMull was responsible for more than 400 edits to the article and had opined on cafemom.com: “I am a well-known Knox hater and proud of it.”

A fight started, with information being added and just as quickly removed. The anti-Amanda faction prevailed, blocking and banning at least eight editors. They also blocked the creation of a separate “Amanda Knox” entry in Wikipedia, with queries re-directed to the Kercher article

One of the banned Wikipedia editors, PhaneulB, posted an open letter and petition to Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. “The Murder of Meredith Kercher article,” the letter said, “in its present form is not written from a neutral point of view and bears little resemblance to what reliable sources have said about the case.”

Not long after Bishop submitted the petition, Wales himself showed up at the “Talk” page of the “Murder of Meredith Kercher” article — the page in which editors can engage in freewheeling discussions. Wales had researched the history of the article and he weighed in decisively against the anti-Amanda edits. He particularly objected to the systematic exclusion of reliable sources. “Is it true that people have been banned for completely neutral edits? Yes. Is it true that reliable sources have been systematically excluded? Yes. None of that is acceptable.” He accused some of the editors of censorship, the gravest of Wikipedia crimes. An acrid online discussion followed, with some of the anti-Amanda editors attacking Wales himself. Wales finally wrote, exasperated, “I am concerned that since I raised the issue, even I have been attacked as being something like a ‘conspiracy theorist’ … Whenever we see outrage in the face of mere questions, it is good to wonder where the truth lies.” Wales, who takes a democratic view of his organization, was loath to throw his weight around and block or unblock editors. The “Talk” page for the article ballooned as editors fought tooth and nail over every turn of phrase. The war over the article went on for months. Finally, around the time Knox was finally acquitted and the evidence against her revealed as bogus, the troubled article was junked and rewritten completely by one of Wikipedia’s top editors, SlimVirgin, who produced a neutral, factual piece.

“These hard core editors,” PhaneulB told me, “were tough as nails. These were not stupid people. They had been involved in Wikipedia before us, which was why they defeated us initially.” He noted that within twelve hours of his posting the letter, anonymous bloggers outed him.

Want to see what this despicable man looks like? Meet PhanuelB otherwise known as Joseph W Bishop.

In addition to photographs, they posted many personal details, his place of employment, his home address, and even a photograph they found online of his family Bible. When they discovered that Bishop had served as an engineer in dangerous areas of Iraq, they went wild with speculation that his stint there had left him “mentally damaged.”

Bloggers at PMF also went after Jimmy Wales, seeing a more sinister motive in his intercession than merely trying to maintain Wikipedia’s neutrality. They latched onto a sexual controversy in his past and used it to claim he had a sexual interest in Knox.

Right now, Jimbo is on the verge of losing any sense of respect as a new media entrepreneur … just for a chance to catch a peek of some tender young sex killer flesh.

Jimbo is precisely the profile of the aging Lothario looking for access to tail through his powerful media connections.

Somebody should give Jimbo a cold shower. He's really lathered up and ready for brunette sex killer action

Skeptical Bystander added her own quip. “In all seriousness, what is it with these wiki guys and their wicks?”

The anti-Amanda group attacked many others who expressed pro-Amanda opinions, often by going after them at their places of employment. They did this in ingenious ways, sometimes by finding out who their supervisors were and attacking them, posting pictures and personal details of their lives, along with insults and threats. Such victims included a high school teacher in Hawaii, a professor at Leeds University, an employee at the Committee to Protect Journalists, a judge in Seattle, criminologists, attorneys, and scientists who did pro-bono work on behalf of Knox. The pro-Amanda bloggers fought back, often anonymously themselves, outing whenever possible the more active bloggers and turning nasty research back on them. Peter Quennell was exposed for harassing a New York City ballet dancer and had a restraining order placed against him. BRMull turned out to be Brendan Robert Mull, a doctor in California who, they discovered, was on probation for attempting to strangle a female psychiatrist who had been treating him for drug and alcohol abuse. Pro-Amanda bloggers posted Skeptical Bystander’s real name and personal information online, her husband’s name, details of her life and shopping habits. They sent her emails threatening enough that she took them to the police, who conducted an investigation. Going after Amanda Knox turned out to be a risky business.

The fundamental question remains: Why did these many people, with no connection to the case and at potential risk to themselves, devote their lives to attacking Amanda Knox and all those who supported her? The answer to this baffling human behavior lies, as many such answers do, in evolutionary biology.

* * *

Katrin Riedl from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, performed a curious experiment with chimpanzees. She set up a situation where a chimpanzee, using a set of pulleys and traps, could steal food from another chimp. A third chimpanzee, observing the theft, could then “punish” the thief by pulling on a rope, depriving the thief of its ill-gotten food. The idea was to see if chimps engaged in “third-party punishment” — that is, if a chimp would punish another chimp for wronging a third chimp.

But the third chimp never punished the thief — not even when the victim was a close relative. This experiment and others showed that chimpanzees do not engage in third-party punishment. If a chimp steals food or commits a wrong against another, the victim will retaliate. But bystanders, even close relatives, will not intervene.

This is starkly different from human behavior. Other researchers at the Max Planck Institute did an experiment with three-year-old children. The experiment ran like this (I’ve simplified it a bit): A child was brought into a playroom, where there were two hand puppets of a cow and an elephant, manipulated by actors. Cow, Elephant, and the child then made their own sculptures out of clay. Cow made a flower, Elephant a snail, and the child created whatever she liked. Then Cow left the room. Elephant said to the child, “I don’t like Cow’s flower. I’m going to break it now.” And Elephant destroyed Cow’s sculpture and put it in the trash.

Almost all the children observing this protested, sometimes tried to intervene, and tattled when Cow returned. After that, the children were friendlier toward Cow, seeking to comfort it, patting and stroking, while turning a cold shoulder on Elephant.

The experiment and others showed that by three years of age, children already demonstrate a strong, innate, and sophisticated propensity to react to and punish third-party transgressions.

Some anthropologists call third-party punishment “altruistic punishment.” Why “altruistic”? Because an individual who punishes a third party who has not harmed him directly, but has transgressed the norms of the group, does so altruistically — that is, for the good of the group with no personal gain. He also does so at personal risk, as the targeted individual may retaliate.

This behavior is unknown in chimpanzees. Which suggests that altruistic punishment is a unique product of human evolution.

One man who has spent the last decade studying the evolution of altruistic punishment is Samuel Bowles, former professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts and now research professor and director of the Behavioral Sciences Program at the Santa Fe Institute. Bowles has a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard. His research challenged the standard economic assumption that people are motivated entirely by self-interest, and this led him to study human evolution and the development of altruistic behavior.

Bowles has looked at this profound question by mathematically modeling the evolution of small human groups and comparing these models with studies of hunter-gatherer societies. He essentially asked the question: how did altruistic behavior evolve? Altruistic behavior on the surface would not appear to be adaptive. Someone who sacrifices or puts himself at risk for the benefit of the group isn’t going to pass on his genes as readily as a selfish person who never sticks his neck out. So why aren’t human societies made up entirely of selfish people acting in their strict self-interest?

The reason is group evolution. A group that cooperates, in which some individuals act for the benefit of the group, will prevail over a group of totally selfish people. But when Bowles mathematically modeled the evolutionary benefit of straight-up cooperation, he found it to be almost nonexistent. Groups of merely cooperative individuals don’t evolve in a strongly cooperative direction, because of the problem of slackers. In such a group, it becomes everyone’s best interest to be a freeloader — that is, a person who benefits from group cooperation without contributing. The slacker is the guy who sleeps under a bush while the rest go out hunting the mammoth, but then partakes in the feast afterwards. To counteract freeloaders, the group needs punishers. It needs someone to say, Hey, pal, you didn’t hunt, you don’t eat. Bowles then modeled the evolutionary benefit of punishment to enforce cooperation. That had a powerful effect on the evolution of cooperation. Without punishment, cooperation in human society would not have evolved.

Here’s how it works. Take a group of, say, two hundred people. Let’s assume the group is composed almost entirely of cooperators with a few slackers. The slackers do nothing, contribute nothing, but use up resources. They are a detriment to the group. If no one in this group is a punisher, the slackers get away with it and drag the group down. They weaken the group, make it less “fit” in evolutionary terms.

If you throw in a few “altruistic” punishers, a dramatic change happens. The freeloaders get punished. The number of slackers drops almost to nothing, the group benefits, and cooperative behavior evolves in a strongly positive direction. And as the number of slackers declines, the risk to the punishers for punishing also drops. The altruistic punishers have made the group stronger, better able to survive, and have done so at a diminishing risk to themselves.

Now assume another situation: Everyone in the group is a rabid punisher. Common sense tells us that this is a toxic situation and the group suffers. An ideal group, then, has a certain percentage of altruistic punishers in it. In such groups, cooperation evolves rapidly.

In other words, one of our most treasured of human qualities — cooperation — evolved only because of the existence of punishment.

Bowles cites many psychology experiments that show human beings are avid to punish wrongdoing, even at expense to themselves. In one well-known study, college students were divided into pairs, A and B. A is given a hundred dollars and told that he can share as much or as little of that with B as he wishes. If B accepts the division, both get to keep the money. If B does not accept, both lose the money.

Logically, B would accept any amount of money from A — after all, it’s free money. Not so. B will gladly accept half and will almost always accept forty dollars. But when A offers B say, twenty dollars, B almost always refuses. Why? Because B wants to punish A for an unfair division, even though that also deprives B of money.

The experiment was extended. Now A shares money with B, with C as a witness. C has the option of punishing A if she thinks the division is unfair, but doing so costs C money. In chimp society, C wouldn’t give a damn about A and B’s sharing problem. But in human society, C will avidly punish A when the division starts to look “unfair,” even at a cost to herself.

Other experiments showed that when people punish, the dorsal striatum, a reward part of the brain, lit up. Those subjects who sacrificed the most to punish got the biggest charge from it.

Bowles mathematical simulations showed that an optimal society has a significant percentage of punishers. “There’s quite a bit of evidence,” he said, “that people really enjoy admonishing, inflicting harm on and punishing other people who are breaking social norms. They love to punish.” This, he points out, is a good thing. “A lot of the people who serve voluntarily in the military, or in criminal justice, are driven by motives of concern for other people. These are good people. If you look at history, what did liberal Europe create? It created a specialized group of people, wearing uniforms and badges, to enforce social norms” in a fair, evenhanded way.

As Bowles delved deeper into the mathematics of cooperation and punishment — particularly when he added warfare to the equation — a darker picture emerged, something he calls “parochial altruism.”

If you run the same simulations, but now set groups against each other in warfare, with the weaker groups experiencing extinction, the mathematics run toward a situation like this: Within the group, slackers are dealt with harshly by punishers. Punishment is even more important, because a slacker in war can seriously endanger the group. Cooperation and altruism evolve even more strongly. “Groups with lots of altruists,” said Bowles, “win wars.” The losers die; they don’t pass on their genes.

Let me pause to emphasize this disturbing point: Warfare in human history was essential for the evolution of cooperation and altruism.

“To call this controversial,” said Bowles dryly, “is an understatement.”

In the warfare scenario an additional, sinister effect becomes evident: Altruism within the group does not and must not extend to outside groups. The members of the other group must be demonized — otherwise, why would you kill them? They are bad to the bone and they must be punished. The altruism applies only within the group, not between groups. It is “parochial.”

In our modern society, this sort of “parochial altruism” can — and does — go haywire. History is littered with examples: the witch trials of Europe, the Inquisition, pogroms, and innumerable irrational wars. In modern times Nazi Germany is a prime example. What was Kristallnacht but “altruistic punishers” gone mad, forming mobs that destroyed Jewish businesses and brutally murdered innocent people because they were the “other”?

Bowles said, “The sentiments that go into the most repugnant racial politics against outsiders come from the same evolutionary source that leads us to respond to natural disasters and helping others. This may be our legacy, that’s how we got this way. But it doesn’t have to be our destiny.”

What does all this have to do with Amanda Knox? I will ask the reader to go back and read the comments quoted in this article — or better yet, Google your own assortment of nasty comments. You will find that most them follow a similar pattern:

1.   Amanda Knox has violated social norms. (e.g. she is a sex pervert, murderess, liar, etc.)

2.   An appropriate punishment is suggested, (e.g. burning, raping, imprisonment for life, rotting in hell).

This is nothing more than third-party or “altruistic” punishment translated to the Internet.

Over the centuries most civilizations have developed state forms of social control and punishment. In our culture, for example, wrongs are investigated and evaluated by neutral parties (the “police”). A public airing of information (“evidence”) is presented in an open, formalized manner with many people participating. The accused by law must be party to the discussions (the “trial”). The accuser must meet the accused face to face. All evidence, pro and con, must be considered. Every stage of the process is open and scrutinized. The state (not the victim’s family) is charged with punishing, so there will be no feuds or vendettas. This process is one of the most precious assets of our society. It took Western civilization many bloody centuries to develop it.

Now we have the Internet. It functions, in part, as a non-state form of social control. But it is one where our punishing instincts go haywire. We earlier saw how anti-Amanda bloggers found one other, established websites, and became a community. We saw how these anti-Amanda communities waged an implacable cyberwar, in which anyone who expressed doubt about Amanda’s guilt became the enemy and a target of the most brutal and irresponsible attacks. Employing a Mafia-like logic, they extended their attacks to friends, families, co-workers, and even the children of their targets. We saw how the desire to punish went absolutely berserk over Amanda Knox.

Never in human history has a system developed like the Internet, which allows for the free rein of our punishing instincts with no checks or balances, no moderation, and no accountability, and conducted with complete anonymity. On the Internet, any assertion, no matter how false, remains forever. It is a process that is horrendously unfair.

Community is a fundamental part of this process. The Internet simulates the small communities in which human beings thrive. But these Internet communities are devoid of the softening effects of real human interactions, in which discussions of wrongdoing occur face to face, where diverse opinions are expressed, and where people are held accountable for what they say. In these cybergroups, all are self-selected punishers. Dissenters are blocked and nonconforming opinions deleted. The accused is dehumanized. A toxic feedback loop of highly filtered information transforms the group into a cybermob not unlike the medieval witch hunts of Europe or lynch mobs in the American South. We see this phenomenon not just in the Knox case but all over the Internet.

The Internet is indeed a non-state form of social control — but one that is severely dysfunctional. The ugliness on the Internet is not white noise. It lasts forever. It cannot be ignored. It causes terrible things happen in the real world. The Internet is a place where our darkest evolutionary biology runs riot.

Table of Contents

Title Page

The bitch needs to die

I was drawn into the case...

Katrin Riedl....