Amanda Knox gained international notoriety for her part in the death of British student Meredith Kercher largely because of Facebook and YouTube.
The story of an attractive, young, American student turned alleged killer is enough to whet the taste buds of any tabloid journalist.
But in 2007 social media blossomed. Media organisations sourced private video via YouTube and intimate private pictures via Facebook. Pretty soon Amanda Knox took on a sinister transformation.
Gone was the All American student, ambitious to learn about the world.
Instead we were presented with a sex crazed, drug fuelled killer. Foxy Knoxy was born.
A simple Google search for the nickname will reveal how easy the myth was to create.
Before social networking was available it would have been difficult to obtain such a range of images, but in apparent disregard of Copyright law, images started to appear in newspapers.
There were holiday photos of Amanda Knox throwing her head back in laughter as she pretended to fire a machine gun.
In another she’s wearing a t-shirt with the word “Lucky” written in green and in one which was well used by many organisations she is the “femme fatal” dressed in black and posing, straight faced with her hand resting on her leg.
Then there are the videos. The most viewed video of Foxy Knoxy on YouTube is of her laughing with friends at what seems to be a party.
In it she appears to have been drinking and repeatedly slurs into the camera: “One and a half, one and a half, OK?”
Grabs and links from these videos quickly circulated around the world and helped develop the image of her as a wild party girl.
Rafaelle Sollecito, Amanda Knox’s then boyfriend and co-accused was pictured wielding a meat cleaver, again a picture taken from a social network.
But it wasn’t just the supposed villains who had their images ripped from social media – it was also the victim.
For many the lasting image of Meredith Kercher will be her dressed as a vampire at a Hallowe’en party she’d attended shortly before her murder.
Numerous websites have been set up in reaction to the negative coverage of Knox. One entitled “Amanda Knox and the Architects of the Foxy Knoxy Myth” names three journalists who it blames for the creation of a media monster.
Whoever, is responsible, without the likes of Facebook and You Tube there remains a question about whether this story would have gained so much mass appeal.