The nation was startled to find out Hannah Anderson, the 16-year-old girl who was taken captive by family friend James DiMaggio, supposedly took to her social media account on Ask.fm to answer personal questions surrounding the incident and the death of her mother and brother (Dimaggio is the lead suspect).

Not many people believed the person answering the questions was actually Hannah, but the account seemed to be valid since it was started at least a month before the kidnapping took place. She shared “selfies” and answered trivial questions like who her celebrity crush is, fueling skeptics to believing it couldn’t be her.

[Click here to check out some snippets of her Ask.fm interview, which has since been deleted, where she selected the questions she would answer]

A girl who had gone through such an ordeal must to be too depressed to even smile for a picture, right? How could she reveal such personal information? Why would her favorite television show even matter?

There’s no way to tell whether or not the person answering questions on Ask.fm Tuesday night was beyond a reasonable doubt Hannah, but it certainly seemed that way due to the content that was posted before and after the incident. Further, the way a 16-year-old would approach and handle grief is most likely very different than how a mature adult would conduct his or herself.

Hannah stated multiple times on the website she did not want to talk to the media. To her, her words had been twisted when she did talk to reporters. Conversely, on the Ask.fm account she chose which questions to answer and was able to take time to answer them with a coherent and complete thought. She was in control. And who knows, maybe in the back of her mind if something negative came out of her choice to take to social media to speak out, she could always say it wasn’t her. Who could know for sure?

This could be what she thought was the safest to communicate her story. She has to be in a pretty lonely place right now, and with a computer screen as her barrier, she might have felt the freedom to say whatever she wanted to say.

In fact, if a teenager were going to say precisely what he or she felt, it would definitely be on social media.