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Showing posts with label Internet abuses. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Internet abuses. Show all posts

Friday 21 June 2013

Malaysian students are disclosing their dirty secrets on Facebook 'confessions pages'

PETALING JAYA: High school and tertiary students have been flocking to certain online pages where they confess their dirtiest secrets and read those of their peers.

The pages contain postings that range from lewd sex fetishes and illegal activities to struggles with depression and suicide.

Students submit confessions anonymously to a mystery page administrator (whose identity is always kept secret), who then publishes it on the Facebook-based confession pages, mostly without any verification of the stories.

Many of the confessions are sex-related. Some goes: “I’m not sure if I have a sex addiction. Possibly.

“I masturbate a LOT and I’m bisexual. I think it’s really unhealthy but I don’t really know how to stop.”

Others use the pages to confess their personal struggles, including one that read: “I had an abortion before about six years ago and it still breaks my heart every single day.”

Another student confessed plans to commit suicide within 60 days, while another told of how he or she turned to marijuana to ease his/her depression.

The trend has grown globally, with news reports from countries like the United States, Australia, India, South Africa, Singapore and Saudi Arabia mentioning the confession pages over the past few months.

The pages (many of which have thousands of followers) are usually linked – without approval – to a school or university, which makes it easier for students to identify who the people confessing are.

One page administrator said the students were sometimes even tagged by friends in their confessions, thus revealing their identities.

The administrator for HUCP, a confession page for HELP University students, said the university’s authorities were aware of the page.

“I don’t think it’s unhealthy. It’s just a tool. It can be used for good or bad,” said the administrator, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

He added that he filtered all the confessions he received to avoid any offensive content.

Malaysian Communications and Mul­timedia Commission chairman Datuk Mohamed Sharil Tarmizi urged caution when it comes to such pages.

According to Section 114A of the Evidence Act 2010, administrators can be held liable for any offensive or defamatory content published on their pages.

“In the case where anything posted from anywhere online that breaks the law of the land, the authorities have the right to intervene and call the people involved for investigation,” said Sharil.

> For the full story on school and university confession pages, turn to today’s R.AGE cover story.

By IAN YEE and DENIELLE LEONG
alltherage@thestar.com.my


Baring it online   

THE 19-year-old founder and administrator of the unofficial Catholic High School (CHS) confession page on Facebook received a shocking “confession” a couple weeks back – a student said he had “contaminated” the school canteen’s chee cheong fun sauce. You don’t wanna know the details.


As outlandish as the claim was, the admin – who takes his anonymity quite seriously – thought nothing about it and posted the confession on the page, just like the other 100 to 200 he receives daily about secret crushes, school gossip and, of course, sex.

“Since then, the chee cheong fun stall has been almost completely empty,” said the admin with an embarrassed laugh. “We’re trying to use the page to get people to eat there again, to help the uncle out.”

Welcome to the world of school, college and university Facebook “confession pages”, where students can submit anonymous “confessions” to a secret administrator, who will then post it on the page (not sanctioned by the schools or universities, of course). It’s all very Gossip Girl- y.

The confessions can be quite innocent, like: “To the girl who wearing pink t-shirt and carrying a LV bag, you’re pretty, hope to see you again [sic].”

Or they could be very raunchy, like: “I am a girl and I have a serious pornography addiction. Every night, I cannot go to sleep unless I spend at least an hour looking at porn.” And that’s just one of the posts we were allowed to publish.

Occasionally, they can be heart-wrenching: “Going to commit suicide in less than 60 days. Pressure mounts from every area in my life and I have just given up today. The reason I give myself 60 days is because my results will be out then and I am certain I will fail almost everything.”

According to American Degree Programme student Joanne Raena Raj, the university pages are usually more explicit.

“At my uni, it’s mostly about sex, drugs and how students don’t attend class,” she said. “There was even a confession about someone who saw a couple having sex in a lecture hall, filmed it, and uploaded the video to the Internet.”

With scandalous confessions like that, it’s no wonder these pages have become wildly popular. The UTAR Confessions gained 1,000 followers in just a week, and is now closing in on the 14,000 mark.

The Catholic High School page has over 3,700 “Likes” (and counting), and it has only been around for about a month! According to the admin, the school only has around 3,000 students.

“Our page statistics show we have followers who are 30-40 years old, and they’re from everywhere – the United States, Britain, Taiwan, Egypt... A lot of them are former students, who write about how they miss the school,” said the CHS admin.

The page masters 

It’s important to remember that none of these confession pages are officially associated with their respective schools or universities. Anyone can start a page, as long as they’re willing to act as a page admin. The pages that gain the largest followings simply end up as the school’s “official” unofficial page.

But being an admin isn’t easy (more on that on page four). Some of them have to go through hundreds of confessions a day, trying their best to approve as many as possible while making sure they don’t post anything that could get them in trouble.

Most pages use the same system – a Google Docs form for users to submit confessions (instead of the Facebook messaging system, which does not provide anonymity), and a Facebook page where the admin can publish them.

The admin for the HUCP page, which serves students from HELP University, said he started the page “just for fun”.

“The way I see it, it’s an outlet to express feelings,” he said. “It’s not just about love and relationships. Some discuss education, and critique their lecturers. We always say students should speak up in college, but when the lecturers ask, they don’t know how to do it.

“So this confession page is like a stepping stone to give people the courage to speak up instead of always bottling it up.”

The response to the posts have been very positive, even from the lecturers, who often get tagged.

“You see a lot of encouragement in the comments. One of the lecturers gives really good advice too, especially on a few posts about teenage pregnancy.”

Like all the other page admins we spoke to, the HUCP admin is very careful about keeping his identity a secret. His witty comments on the page have attracted a fair amount of interest from other students, but he doesn’t intend to reveal himself.

“I’m not doing this to get famous. Plus, some of them can get unhappy with me (over certain confessions). It’s also a good way for me to remain unbiased,” he added.

Official word 

Many universities and higher education institutions are aware of this trend, according to Monash University Sunway Campus senior marketing manager Ooi Lay Tin, who was quick to add that they are “not endorsed or controlled by the institutions in any way”.

The HUCP admin said the university has so far taken a fairly liberal approach towards his page. He said they’ve tried to find out who he is with no success, but they still managed to get in touch with him online.

“The university’s head of social media said it was fine for us to post our opinions – just don’t use the university’s name. And I respect that, I understand that, so we closed the group and started a new one – HUCP,” he said.

A university media relations officer, who had no idea her university had a popular confession page, was more wary.

“It’s good that the students have a place to rant and vent their frustrations, but confession pages are not the right platform as they could jeapordise the institution’s reputation,” she said.

For the HUCP admin, the key is moderation. Some admins are quite daring in approving confessions, but he makes sure everything that goes public on his page is not offensive or defamatory.

“The students have to learn to self-censor. The admins will moderate, but you should think for yourself and know what you should or shouldn’t post.”

CONFESSION pages have been sweeping the world, with news reports from the United States, Australia, India, South Africa, Singapore and Saudi Arabia all bringing the trend to light.

There’s no telling how, where or when the trend started; but the pages, which are unofficially linked to schools and universities, allow students to submit anonymous confessions to be published on a Facebook page – and they have caused quite a stir with the often raunchy nature of the “confessions”.

According to a story by Reuters, police in Montana, US moved to shut down two high school confession pages due to the constant offensive content, but the students simply started a third, prompting the police to threaten defamation charges. Pages in Idaho and Arizona have also been shut down by schools.

A more worrying case surfaced just three months ago when a student at Aragon High School in the US posted a threat against the school in a confession page, which has lead to police patrols around the school.

In Australia, ANU Confessions, a page for students of the Australian National University, was removed from Facebook due to explicit descriptions of sexual violence against women.

But that hasn’t stopped confession pages from popping up all over the world. Princeton, Harvard and Yale all have pages now (though they are very inactive, leading one user to comment “there’s a reason why they bring home Nobels”), while the National University of Singapore even has its own website (confesslah.com) with over 89,000 confessions and counting.



There’s even a website called www.college-confessions.com, where users (mostly from American universities) can publish confessions directly to the site, and not through a Google Doc form like most other Facebook-based pages. All confessions are tagged along with others from the same university, with the University of North Texas currently leading the way with almost 8,000 posts.

Most active confession pages
stuff

By DENIELLE LEONG, IAN YEE and KEVIN TAN

Wednesday 6 June 2012

Chinese student murdered by Canadian, suspect held, safety in the West?

Self-styled porn star Luka Rocco Magnotta has been arrested in a Berlin internet café, where he was identified while watching pornography and reading news stories about the global effort to track him down. His capture came as a relief to Montreal’s Chinese community, following the identification late last week of -born student Lin Jun, whom Magnotta allegedly murdered, dismembered and mailed parts of to political parties.



In China, the case seems set to deepen perceptions of foreign study as a risky prospect, following another in last year and two widely publicised incidents in April: the shootings of two Chinese students in Los Angeles, and an overtly racist attack on two others on a Sydney train. It remains unclear whether Lin’s killing was racially motivated or simply part of a sustained campaign of increasingly extreme attention seeking. Montreal police would not speculate on the matter, but suspicions have taken root among the local Chinese community. From The Globe and Mail:
The murder of Mr. Lin has provoked widespread shock and anger in China, where many believe the crime was racially motivated. The Chinese embassy in Ottawa has warned citizens living or travelling in Canada to “strengthen their personal security” in the wake of the deadly attack.
Mr. Lin’s death is the second killing of a Chinese student in Canada in just over a year, following last April’s murder of York University student Liu Qian, part of which was watched on Skype by her boyfriend back in China.
[…] A makeshift memorial to Mr. Lin sprang up in downtown Montreal in front of the statue of Norman Bethune, the Canadian surgeon regarded as a hero in China. The foot of the statue was covered with bouquets along with a note in English, French and Chinese that summed up the sense of relief over Mr. Magnotta’s arrest: “We got that beast.”
An earlier Globe and Mail report quoted the embassy’s warning, and outlined the case’s possible impact on Canadian universities’ ability to attract .
“The Chinese Embassy in Canada reminds Chinese citizens traveling in Canada, as well as students and the staff of Chinese organizations in Canada, to improve their self-protection [and] awareness, and to strengthen their personal security,” reads the final paragraph of the Embassy’s Chinese-language statement on Mr. Lin’s murder, which called condemned the “heinous criminal act.” A similar warning was posted on the webpage of the Chinese consulate in Montreal.
[…] “The impact of the case will be very bad on Canada,” Meng Xiaochao, the boyfriend who witnessed the attack on Ms. Liu, said in an interview. “Last year when Liu Qian’s case happened, many parents said they were no longer willing to send their children to Canada. Now here comes this other case.”
More than 50,000 Chinese students currently live and study in Canada. Like all foreign students, they pay higher tuition than their Canadian-born classmates, making them highly sought-after by cash-strapped universities. Another 242,000 Chinese came to Canada as tourists last year, a number the travel industry had been hoping would increase by as much as one-fifth this year.
An infographic at GOOD shows the most favoured destinations for Chinese students abroad, with Canada ranking third behind the US and UK. 85% of Chinese with net worths of more than one million US dollars reportedly plan to send their offspring to study overseas: those who have already done so include Bo Xilai, at least five of the nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee, if one includes grandchildren, and noted crusader against foreign trash Yang Rui. The strong association of with wealth triggered a storm of resentment around the USC case in April. Some online reactions to Lin Jun’s murder displayed similar sentiments, though many others attacked such unsympathetic responses. Many expressed concern at the apparent dangers of journeys to the West, linking the Magnotta case to other bizarre and gruesome stories of recent weeks. From chinaSMACK

Porn star accused of killing gay ex-lover ate victim's body parts, claim police

Video footage of the suspected Montreal murderer Luka Rocco Magnotta show him eating the body parts of his alleged victim, police said yesterday.

Montreal Police Commander Ian Lafrenière said that while it could not be confirmed, his officers suspected Magnotta of eating parts of the lover he is accused of killing and dismembering.

German prosecutors further revealed yesterday that they intended to extradite Magnotta to Canada following his surprise arrest in Berlin on Monday.



The pornographic-film actor and model, 29, is wanted on suspicion of murdering and dismembering his male Chinese student lover and sending his victim's body parts to political parties in one of Canada's most gruesome killings.

Magnotta fled from Montreal to Berlin via Paris. He was arrested in an internet café in the German capital on Monday morning. Yesterday he appeared before a judge and was remanded in custody until further notice.

Prosecutors said they were awaiting a request from Montreal Police for his extradition. A spokesman said the process could take "several days".

Canadian police have confiscated a film of a man killing his victim with an ice pick. The video is thought to show Magnotta murdering his 33-year-old lover, Jun Lin. His motive is said to have been jealousy.
The killer is suspected of dismembering his victim's body and posting parts of the corpse to Canada's Conservative and Liberal parties.

Magnotta is nicknamed "psycho killer" because the soundtrack to the video allegedly showing the murder carried excerpts from the film American Psycho.

Canadian porn actor who killed man and mailed body parts arrested

Berlin: A Canadian porn actor suspected of murdering and dismembering a Chinese student and mailing his body parts to Canada's top political parties was reading about himself on the internet when he was arrested on Monday at a cafe in Berlin.



Canadian investigators say 29-year-old Luka Magnotta's obsessions led him to post internet videos of his killing kittens, then a man, and finally to his arrest at the cafe where he had spent two hours reading media coverage of himself.

An international manhunt set off by a case of internet gruesomeness that captured global attention ended quietly in the working-class Neukoelln district of the German capital when a cafe employee recognised Magnotta from a newspaper photo and flagged down a police car.

Confronted by seven officers, "He tried at first giving fake names but in the end he just said: 'You got me’," said police spokesman Guido Busch. "He didn't resist."

Magnotta is wanted by Canadian authorities on suspicion of killing Jun Lin, a 33-year-old man he dated, in Canada, and mailing his body parts to two of Canada's top political parties before fleeing to Europe.

They say Magnotta filmed the murder of the Chinese student in his Montreal studio apartment and posted it online. The video shows a man with an ice pick stabbing another naked, bound male. He also dismembers the corpse and performs sexual acts with it in what police called a horrifying video.

The warning signs apparently were already there. For nearly two years animal activists had been looking for a man who tortured and killed cats and posted videos of his cruelty online. Since Lin's murder, Montreal police have released a photo from the video which they say is of Magnotta.

In 2005, Magnotta was accused of sexually assaulting a woman, but the charges were dropped, the lawyer who represented him at the time said.

Magnotta is believed to have fled to France on May 26, based on evidence police found at his apartment and a blog he once posted about disappearing.

In Germany, surveillance camera footage of the internet cafe, obtained by the Associated Press, showed Magnotta casually walking in to the shop at noon local time, wearing jeans, a green hoodie sweater and sunglasses.

He briefly spoke to the internet cafe's desk person, then walked off to his assigned computer with the number 25 where he would later be spotted reading the news about his case.

About two hours later, seven German police officers are seen walking into the shop, without any haste or arms.

On the camera footage, three police officers are seen accompanying the handcuffed Magnotta a couple of minutes after they first entered the cafe. Magnotta calmly walks alongside them, again wearing sunglasses.

In Germany, police spokeswoman Kerstin Ziesmer said Magnotta is being questioned, and will be brought before a judge behind closed doors.

"He says he is the wanted person," she added, while cautioning that his identity must still be independently confirmed by German authorities.

Canada, like Europe, has no death penalty, making extradition more likely. Quebec bureau of prosecutions spokesman Rene Verret said it could still take a long time to get him back to Canada, but he said if Magnotta doesn't contest the order he could be returned within a couple of weeks.

The case's full horror emerged when a package containing a severed foot was opened at the ruling Conservative Party headquarters on May 29. That same day a hand was discovered at a postal facility, addressed to the Liberal Party of Canada. And a torso was found in a suitcase on a garbage dump in Montreal, outside Magnotta's apartment building. Police in masks combed through the blood-soaked Montreal studio apartment last Wednesday.

As they unraveled his background, police discovered that Luka Magnotta changed his name from Eric Clinton Newman in 2006 and that he was born in Scarborough, Ontario. He is also known as Vladimir Romanov.

His mother, Anna Yourkin in Peterbourgh, Ontario, said she had no comment, apologised and hung up the phone.

Toronto lawyer Peter Scully said he represented Magnotta in a fraud case in 2004 and a sexual assault case in 2005.

He said Magnotta was charged with a dozen counts of fraud and impersonation for using a woman's credit card to buy about $17,000 worth of goods, including a television, DVD player and several cellphones. He said he pleaded guilty to four fraud-related charges after serving 16 days in pre-trial custody. He received a nine-month conditional sentence and a year of probation.

Scully said Magnotta was charged with sexually assaulting a woman in 2005, but the prosecution decided to withdraw the charges. The woman's father became so irate and threatening that Scully said he wrote a letter to police and the prosecutor, telling them about it.

Scully remembered Magnotta as soft spoken and polite.

"I've had lots of creepy characters and Eric did not stand out as one of them," he said. Scully refers to his client by his previous name, Eric Newman.

But Nina Arsenault, a Toronto transsexual who said she had a relationship with Magnotta over a decade ago, described him as a drug user with a temper, who sometimes turned his anger on himself, hitting himself on the head, and other parts of his body.

While Magnotta described himself in an online video interview with a site called "Naked News" as a stripper and male escort, Lin, who was from Wuhan, China, was registered as an undergraduate in the engineering department and computer science at Concordia University in Montreal. Police have confirmed Magnotta is a porn actor and that he and Jun had a relationship.

Zoya De Frias Lakhany, 21, a fellow Concordia student in some of Lin's classes, said he was an excellent student who was shy and humble. She said she cried all weekend.

"He was happy here, he would take pictures of the snow and post them," she recalled. "He was sweet, never complained and smiled all the time."

Montreal Police Cmdr Ian Lafreniere said investigators are extremely relieved and pleased about the arrest.

"We said from the beginning that the web has been used to glorify himself and we believe the web brought him down," said Lafreniere. "He was recognised because his photo was everywhere."

Related post:
Apr 25, 2012