In October 2006, 13-year-old Megan Meir hanged herself allegedly after receiving cruel messages from a fake MySpace account originally designed to make her believe that a 16-year-old boy named Josh Evans was interested in her. Yesterday, Lori Drew, 49, of suburban St. Louis, who allegedly helped create the account, was indicted by a federal grand jury on one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to get information used to inflict emotional distress.

Salvador Hernandez of the FBI, which investigated the case, told the Associated Press, “The Internet is a world unto itself. People must know how far they can go before they must stop. They exploited a young girl’s weaknesses. Whether the defendant could have foreseen the results, she’s responsible for her actions.”

With the youth vote skyrocketing, candidates are eagerly seeking connection points with 18-30 year-olds. Social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and others are emerging as the best connection point and proving to be a powerful tool for youth votes in the Presidential elections.

Every front running candidate today has made efforts to engage the social networking crowd—some candidates jumping in faster than others.

Until the beginning of this year, Clinton’s interest in the Facebook vote was minimal. However, when Obama drew 57% of the 18-30 year-old vote in Iowa (compared to her 11%) it sparked her interest. She now proudly answers questions from avid Facebookers on her website and boasts an impressive Facebook page herself.

Almost every candidate now has the Facebook logo easily accessible on their website, linking supporters to their pages. More than 1 million “Facebookers” have added the “US Politics” Application. And just in case anyone is counting Facebook “friends”, the numbers are growing every minute. This Saturday in the span of 7 hours, Obama gained more than 6,000 Facebook supporters (from 454,108 to 460,643, up from 381,179 the night of Super Tuesday). Clinton has 106,949 and Ron Paul, John McCain, and Mike Huckabee follow with 83,558, 53,917, and 51,809 respectively.

Chrissy Faessen from Rock the Vote told WoW, “New technology has absolutely affected and influenced the way youth voters engage politics.” She cited social networking as well as mobile marketing (text message reminders and updates) as two key strategies changing the rules of the game for the 2008 election.

Social networks have now gone beyond support groups and debate pages. Viewers from all over the U.S. tuned in to the MySpace/MTV Presidential dialogue series and ABC/Facebook Presidential debates recently, both boasting live Webcasts and instant feedback from viewers. Faessen asserts that “this new generation is more engaged than ever.”

One year ago, 13-year-old Megan Meier fashioned cloth around the support beam in her closet and hanged herself. She was driven to end her life by a tanked online relationship and the harrassing Internet messages of a boy named Josh Evans.

Meier parents later learned that Josh Evans didn’t exist - that the Drews, a neighborhood family, had created him fictionally to get back at Megan for a dispute with their daughter.

Jake Meador, a sophomore English major at the University of Nebraska, continues the story and offers this reflection in a wonderful column at Daily Nebraskan:

The prankster was Lori Drew, who wanted to know what Megan was saying about her daughter.

When I first read this tragic story, my reaction was a mixture of numbness, anger, terrible grief and abject horror at the behavior of Lori Drew. Drew is not being prosecuted because the state of Missouri has no law under which she can be charged.

That’s a gross injustice, and it’s something that needs to be changed. But it’s not what strikes me most about this story. The thing that breaks my heart about this story is the utter loneliness of it all.

There’s a lonely 13-year-old girl with a broken heart, and there’s a lonely 40-something woman so insecure that she created a MySpace account to find out what others were saying about her daughter. There are Megan’s parents, who are now getting a divorce. . .

The most basic lesson we can take from the tragic story of Megan Meier is that loneliness kills - sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively, but it always kills.

As our nation is outraged we are again remined that the union of loneliness and pain has volatile power when encouraged by evil.