What would it take to get you to sign off MySpace or Facebook? Over your dead body, right? Except as millions are realizing, the anonymity of the Internet plus the inherent cruelty of teens can equal some hairy situations, the most recent of which involved an 18-year-old sexually assaulting classmates with the help of Facebook. Anthony Stancl created a fictional profile, convinced some of his peers that he was a hot young girl and got them to send him nude pictures of themselves, which he then used to blackmail them into performing sexual acts for him.

Makes you long for the days of burn books and writing slutty girls' phone numbers in the boy's bathroom, huh? Below, we explore some of the more extreme reasons you should think twice before signing in.

Missing Identity
Sophomore year in college, a couple friends and I were dicking around on Friendster and decided to create a profile for one of our friends who hadn't signed up yet. We included pics, some, uh…exaggerated details (suddenly our mild friend was into guys with motorcycles and tattoos, "the grimier the better") and added some mutual friends to her account. Within days, our friend's online persona was corresponding with guys on campus she had never spoken to before, and in real life coming up to us confused as to why the crust-punk kid from Calc class had been giving her the eye.

That was nothing. Turns out there are some real sick people out there, and not just the ones posing as underage girls on AOL chat forums. Since Facebook and MySpace gained popularity, the number of identity theft and data mining cases has exploded. Some are mild, like the spammers who take over your profile and send out wall messages to people you never talk to, inviting them to sign up for free soft-core porn (which is why we all stopped using MySpace, lets be honest), while some actually manage to do more damage to your credit history than your reputation. In 2007, hacked MySpace accounts went for $15 per thousand, and when you consider how many people use the same goddamn password for their MySpace as they do for say, their ATM pin number, you can see how these sites helped nurture the incidents of online identity theft.

Unending Cruelty

At least for sites like Facebook and MySpace, there was a general purpose of bringing friends together and reconnecting you with all those kids in high school you left 10 years ago and were hoping never to see until the 25th reunion. But when JuicyCampus came onto the scene in 2007, it opened a whole can of mean-girl worms. The possibilities of writing about your classmates anonymously on a campus-wide forum? Yeah, that's going to bring out the best in people.

Started in August, by December there were already death threats, mass shooting scares and students who felt forced to drop out of school because of the degrading messages posted about them. Was this really all in good fun, as founder Matt Ivester suggested? It seems doubtful, seeing as how by the time of this article, JuicyCampus has not only been banned by several colleges, but shut down completely due to the negative material on the site.

Megan Meier

Loss of Life

Maybe the biggest backlash of social networking sites came with the 2006 death of 13-year-old Megan Meier, whose neighbor created a fake profile of a cute boy, courted Meier and then devastatingly dumped her online, leading the young girl to hang herself. The media villainized the neighbor, 49-year old Lori Drew, because, honestly, who the fuck does that? But while the rampant scare tactics ("How MySpace Can Kill You!") employed to boost ratings did nothing to deter most teens from Facebook or MySpace, the nugget of truth behind Meier's death is more chilling than just the anonymous technology. Cyber-bullying doesn't stop when someone reaches adulthood. Lori Drew was a grown woman with a family, not a snarky teen writing comments on a blog. The implication is that these sites are not just aggression outlets for those pubescent feelings, or places to Catch a Predator, but that they actually have a transformative ability inherent in their structure. Lori Drew didn't mean to kill her barely Bat-mitzvah-aged neighbor, but things just "got out of control," as they so often do when you combine the ease of account creation with limitless imagination and just a smidgen of cruel intentions.