The Morning After

Bishop's plan, she explained, was to invite into the group only people she knew from school who might interact with Shaw-Fox and warn them to avoid him whenever he drank alcohol. But she didn't consider that Facebook publishes a "News Feed," a feature which lists just about everything a person does on the site—including adding new photos, changing one's status from "single" to "in a relationship," or creating a new group with a salacious name. The group itself included no specific allegations of rape. But its title was reported to each of Bishop's 91 Facebook "friends" at Lewis & Clark. Each time someone joined, Facebook disseminated that "news" to the complete list of friends, rapidly spreading Shaw-Fox's name all over campus.

Bishop says she did not intend to destroy Shaw-Fox's reputation. "None of us wanted to bring him down," she said. "I didn't think it was going to be this big. We had no idea the can of worms we were opening. I'm worrying now about being sued for libel."

The group's "wall," a part of the site where any member can post links, pictures or comments, soon became a flashpoint of discussion about the propriety of the group with the accusatory name. Some users hailed the group's creators as soldiers in the battle against sexual assault—a rampant and often underreported crime on colleges campuses. (Lewis & Clark reported three incidents in 2006.) Others lambasted the group's administrators as "vigilantes" who were defaming Shaw-Fox's character with no proof to back up the rape allegation. The Facebook group only lasted a week before the women pulled it down amid growing criticism.

What happened at Lewis & Clark is a reminder of the power of social-networking sites like Facebook, which now boasts more than 60 million active members, according to Forrester Research. It's the sixth most trafficked site in the United States, with more than 65 billion page views per month. More than half of its active users visit the site every day. "Facebook has enormous power as a potential weapon," said Montana Miller, an ethnographer at Bowling Green State University who is conducting a study about how students at the Ohio college use Facebook. "For a long time, people have been called sluts, losers, cheaters and rapists anonymously on bathroom walls. For today's cyberconnected campuses, Facebook is the bathroom wall on steroids. You can erase it and replace the wall, but once it's posted online, it stays up forever."

Others see social networks as a force that just needs to be better harnessed. "A lot of educational institutions, particularly at the secondary-school level, just hope to avoid [networking sites]. They want to filter out Facebook and MySpace and delay the day of reckoning as long as they can. They're not seeing it as a chance to educate," says Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University and author of a forthcoming book called "The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It." "The sooner young people can learn how to responsibly exercise the power they have online, the better."

A Facebook spokesperson declined to speak about the Shaw-Fox group but told NEWSWEEK via e-mail that the site bans derogatory, demeaning, malicious, defamatory, abusive, offensive or hateful material, and that such content is removed when reported.