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The Rise of Cyber Bullying
santos_douglas writes "The Detroit Free Press has an article detailing the problems schoolchildren now face in the form of online cyber bullying. As if parents didn't already have enough to worry about! Examples include rumor spreading typically via text messaging, threatening emails, invasive pictures taken with camera phones, and the most extreme - creating entire websites to criticize/threaten/harass another student. The article suggests many tips for combating the problem - chief among them being the establishment of specific school policies. I suppose this is another example of an inevitable downside to the interconnected world. Mandatory Google search for your added reading pleasure."
Does Front Page Express still come free with Windows? I hope not...
The guitars sound good, now give me about 10db more on the cow bell.
Slander is not a protected form of free speech. You have every right to voice your complaint about someone or some company, but if you start posting lies in a public forum, intending to harm a third-party, then you are opening yourself up to a libel suit.
Bullying is not protected by the First Amendment.
i'm totally at a loss for this one. what could suck more!? every embarassing thing i did in 6th-8th grade now only resides in the distant memory of classmates. i'd probably kill myself if it was part of the internet for ever and ever. (hell, i'm still embarassed by dumbass posts i made to usenet in the 90's!)
this is a very interesting side-effect of the 'net. i don't know if this can be remedied, but it does imply that children now have accept the possibility of total transparency in their lives. as hard as it is to swallow, maybe this is how the new culture begins...
i would say i'm glad i'm not her, but this could, in reality, happen to ANYONE. it's just harder to ignore as a child, and it's harder to sue for libel/slander. but still, who to sue?
gah.
the transparent society is gonna suck.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
anyone posting AC here I'm gonna kick your ass, I know who you are and you better have your lunch money with you tomorrow.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I guess we've found yet another use for micropayments.
My little brother's website (which includes photos and comments sections) was spammed pretty bad by a member of a rival football team.
/24.
My the profanities! I'm thinking of making Apache redirect to goatse.cx the next time someone comes back from the offender's
Am I the only one who sees a problem with giving schools control over students' lives beyond campus grounds? Why is it that some people are so quick to abdicate control and responsibility of their children to a government beaurocracy? Are today's parents really that bad? Is the government that eager to monitor/regulate every aspect of our lives?
It's time for people to stop blaming the school system and making out kids the taxpayers' problem. If your kid is a fuck-up, be a goddamned parent and put them in their place! Stop automatically run crying to the government!
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
In grade/middle school some people resented me because of my grades/intelligence. You know what I did when I got picked on? I picked back. A witty remark will often slow a bully quite well. Sure, this isn't a very civilized situation, but who ever said that kids were civilized?
At least, there is no physical harm done in cyber-bullying. There's also no reasonable way to stop it. Shall we enact rules for school children that they never say anything that isn't nice on school time or off? Some of the examples amount to slander, and if they get particularly bad, you could bring a suit, but c'mon there are enough lawsuits now without every school child suing every other child for slander.
I realize that being made fun of isn't very pleasant, but that's something that kids have to deal with. Their parents should help put it in perspective.
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
At first read I found this laughable but after a bit of thought I see a rekindling of an already occurring problem. Children will always be children, they will always be immature, they will always be impressionable. The problem herein is parents. I have a 10yo, and 11yo. They do not go on the internet without permission and they conduct themselves as we dictate. No chat rooms, no e-mails from anyone we dont already know. The parents of all there friends form a network with us via e-mail and the children are aware of this. They also respect it understanding the inherent dangers of the internet. Using yahoo parental controls anyone sending them e-mails with profanities or pre flagged words gets reported to us. If the account they are using is linked to a parental account reporting it to the parent is easy. So before someone starts blaming the internet look to the Parents.
For one thing, such e-messages are traceable records; bullying in person is insidious because they're usually careful to make sure that no one actually can prove they did it. Parents and school officials can use these to deal with the bullies promptly.
On the other hand, kids need to be taught how to deal with stuff like that, and probably the tabloid press is a good place to use as an example: show them how some celebrities take it too seriously and waste a lot of time an energy fighting it, while others make fun of it and ignore it.
They can also make use of it to find out who their real friends are. People who believe everything they hear without checking at the source aren't much of a friend in the first place.
Sorry, but "sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me" doesn't hold true. Verbal abuse is just as bad as physical abuse. BTW, I didn't think SMS was anon - I thought it'd give you the phone number (there are many services that WILL send anon SMS, though - just over the internet)
The article sux0r5, and so does the author, MIKE WENDLAND!
MIKE WENDLAND, I've got embarrassing pictures of you!
And I know where you work, MIKE WENDLAND!
I'll be watching to see if you write any more of your "columns", MIKE WENDLAND!
Yeah, don't you forget it MIKE WENDLAND. I'll be watching every Monday and Friday, and alternate Tuesdays and Thurdays.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Wouldn't this be a perfect opportunity for the nerds to get even with the bullies?
I did precisely that, by embarrassing them. What could be worse for the "cool guy's" tough image than getting kicked in the throat by the fat nerdy black kid?
Before you ask, yes I did this. Later that same year, I lifted a kid 2 years older than me off of his feet and blackened his eye with a haymaker right hand.
We need to start teaching children how to defend themselves. Regardless of school policy, legally you have the right to defend yourself. If bullies are pushing your kid around, if bullies are beating your kid up, give your child the means to defend him/herself. Let your kid know that even if he/she gets in trouble at school for standing up for him/herself, you'll back him/her up.
Thankfully my mother let me off of the leash, so to speak, that the school tried to keep me on. Beat the bullies senseless two or three times, and guess what, they leave you alone.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
They only last if you let them. Learn to ignore it. And yes, it *can* be ignored, and it *can* be dealt with at that age. I managed it, and those freaks were merciless to me. But after a while they get tired of it, and move on.
Just takes willpower, which kids today are not being trained to use or improve.
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
Being bullied is getting pushed down a flight of stairs, not getting an anonymous text message about how dopey your shoes look. Sheesh.
No.
Clearly you weren't one of the kids who got called "Fatty fat fat fatass" every day in junior high school... if you had been, you'd know the kind of lasting damage that words can cause.
PS Your shoes look dopey.
Right. But this sounds more like a girl thing, where bullying is verbal--rumors, character assassination, etc.
I was a Scrawny Geek(TM), and I got the bejeezus knocked out of me on a regular basis (until I finally learned how to fight). But when I saw what was done to my female counterparts, I was glad all I had to deal with was getting the occasional beatdown. All an asshole jock could hand me was some humiliation and maybe a trip to the hospital.
The girls got utterly destroyed, in ways no physical harm could match.
My theory on this is that from middle through high school, boys form a linear hierarchy of individuals. We're constantly moving up and down on it, usually within a fairly narrow range, within which most boys find their small circle of friends. With few exceptions, each boy is on there somewhere.
Girls form a hierarchy of groups whose position is fairly fixed. The girls within a group are of roughly equal stature, but there might be one or two leaders. A particular girl is either all the way in or all the way out of a particular group, and some are out of all the groups altogether. Very few boys ever have to deal with that level of alienation (and most of the boys I know who were that far off the hierarchy were off by choice).
Having never been female, though, that's just speculation; feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
I find it interesting that a lot of the replies here deal with "how nerds can get back at the cyberbullies".
Very few, if any, are assuming that the nerds ARE the cyberbullies.
Bullying is about strength. In the real world, that can be physical or political/social. In the internet, that can be technical prowess. He who hacks better, bullies better.
Ironic that this would show up here on Slashdot because this kind of shit happens here all the time. Note: the vast majority of people here don't abuse this site...I have a small minority of abusers in mind as I write this.
/. journal almost like still having MsGeek.Org, the only diff is that someone else has to worry about security issues and assholes. It's too bad... /. used to be fun a few years ago.
Let's face it, guys, cyberbullying happens here all the time...a few twits calling each other queer, indulging in the cyber equivalent of towel-snapping in the locker room, modding people down as "flamebait," "troll," and "overrated" just because you don't agree with them or they rub you the wrong way...the irony is so thick it's not even funny.
MsGeek.Org closed down because of a group of cyberbullies and their extended attack on the site. Many of the people responsible still post here, and often. The crapflooders never have, and never will, provide anything of value on this site...they just shovel out the same crap, the same disgusting gay porn and disguised links to goatse and tubgirl. Someone needs to hit the entire lot of the crapflooders over their collective heads with a clue by four...it stopped being "cute" or "funny" years ago.
I kicked the WIPO Troll off my site and got his account pulled because he posted hardcore gay porn pics to my board using an IE exploit. He came by it rightly. I specifically started MsGeek.Org to give women in technology a "clean, well-lighted" environment to post on a Slashdot-like forum. The crapflooders ruined that, up to and including running exploits against the board software itself. The security issues got to be so much for the good people at Hosting Matters that we mutually decided it wasn't worth it.
I wish that Taco and Hemos and the rest of the founders here had the cojones to pull the accounts of those who have made posting here uncomfortable for many people. I have no problems dealing with it...I'm a 10-year Usenet veteran with the virtual purple hearts to prove it. But I have gotten emails from women who don't read Slashdot because the crap posts are so disturbing to them.
Anyway, this is why I continue to have comments turned off on my journal. I wanted one place where I couldn't be shouted down by a small minority of obnoxious idiots, and I have it. I am sorry that the stupid yahoo.com address always gets filled up with spam and people can't get email to me there. I intend to find another webmail account with a bit more space so you have some way of contacting me. I might even break down and pay Yahoo for a bigger mailbox. Whatever.
I was going to post this anonymously, but screw it...do your worst. Mod it down to Kingdom Come. I don't care anymore. Karma is worthless at this point anyway...I posted for awhile under an identity I used when posting from work, and it took me a grand total of 2 months to go from newbie to the 50 point cap. W00t. That account could have been used to troll like a mofo...instead, I retired it, Blade Runner stylee. I don't even remember the password on the account anymore, fuck it.
I'll chime in every now and again, but right now the main reason I use this site is to blog. My
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I agree wholeheartedly, I'm 15 and at high school in the UK. Today the latest rules to 'improve discipline and school image' were revealed, they basically consist of forcing girls to remove all make-up (on top of the extremely strict uniform we've already got) and pushing us all to have school IDs which do not, AFAICS, have any purpose at all.
Not only are they wasting their time with pointless rules, they're failing miserably in educating us properly. The fact is that all they are drilling into our heads now is facts to pass exams, not understanding. I generally have a good memory for this type of information and therefore get bored quickly - given the chance I could probably learn a years syllabus in a week and do OK on the exam. IMO the solution would be give the higher ability students the chance to understand the work on a higher level, but not according to the school, all I get is a conversation something along the lines of:
"Why aren't you working?"
"I finished it all."
"Is your shirt button undone?"
"Errr.. yes, sorry"
"Sit in silence for the rest of the lesson, and you've got a detention if that button's undone again"
This is the worse end of the teaching, but it's still a daily occurance.
Being female, I took a moment to compare your theory to my high school experiences. The thing is, none of it seemed to apply. My crowd had both male and female members; so did every crowd I can recall. In middle school, I caught some nasty abuse, but in high school, I was unaware of any true bullying. It probably existed, but I wasn't aware of it. There were fights in my high school, but they tended to be between girls fighting over some guy (no, really!).
...
Just some random thoughts
-monique
A couple things to think about in regard to 'children' in schools and 'bullying'.
Children are
Worse, it's up to the victim's parents whether or not to act... leaving those with the worst homelives the most vulnerable... either to bullying or being bullied.
IMHO, if you can legally require the separation of the bully from the victim, you may have really helped one kid.
I also think the comment in the article that "... while these comments may seem silly to people who have matured, they are very devastating to the young people on the receiving end..." ignores the above reality.
It's tough to draw analogies to adult life, but what if you were legally required to show up for work? What if somebody spread a similarly scandalous rumour about you at work? Oh... let's see... while kids might think it cool to grab a peer's breasts, the reverse might just work for adults. So, your coworker starts telling people that you grabbed her breasts, and you're making passes at her all the time. So your coworkers begin to shun you. You can't quit... you're legally required to be there. You can't call the police, they won't do anything because this is just a little bit of workplace bullying. Now your boss... who happens to be 150% of your height, twice your strength and twice your weight, might just believe the person spreading the scandal, so it will be your word against theirs.
Your friends at work no longer want to be seen with you, because anyone can fall victim to such harassment... so you become ostracised... Some even join in to dispel rumours that they too might be perverts. Few people really believe the rumours, but they know you're not a safe person to be around because you... and anyone you're around is a target.
Seeing that you have no allies, people begin to pick on you, steal your office supplies, scratch your car, slash your tires.
So you keep going to work, despite all this, because you're legally forced to.
Now we're getting close except: kids don't get paid, have little control over their homelife and they've never known anything else.
Just as I would imagine was the _alot_ of guys here, I too got picked on when I was in Junior High. For years..Got randomly spit on, punched, kicked, you name it..by a group of about 3 or 4 of em, all older than me. It was a real blast, lemmie tell ya.
Then one day, I decided I about had enough, picked up a desk, and sent it crashing straight down ontop of one of them. Crushed his larynx. He couldn't talk for months, and even when he regained his speech, he sounded like Popeye. Karma works in mysterious ways.
Anyway, back to the story. I got taken by no less than three teachers down to the Principal's office, where I was given a "5 day out-of-school suspension".. One notch below formal expulsion back in those days. Interestingly, my folks backed me up, and essentially told the school to fuck off, since I had no prior record of doing anything even remotely like that, the school knew this kid was a bully, and never bothered to do anything about him. Bottom line, I was back in school within a day...And even more interestingly, I never had a problem with any of the other bullies after that. Didn't hear a single peep.
Thats not to say I advocate violence. I don't. But if you're dealing with what amounts to a juvenille sociopath who's parents can't control him, and a school who won't protect your kid, then that's what you have to do.
I really, really don't understand how we, as a culture, arrived at the idea that we should expect our kids to "just ignore them", or "talk it out" with a bully. That has never, and will never solve anything. At the end of the day, you have a God-given right to defend yourself and your dignity. End of story.
I'm going to be a father myself, pretty soon..And if theres anything i'd want my kid to learn from my experience, it would be that if ever gets bullied, and decides to beat the snot out of some kid to reclaim a portion of his dignity, Mom & Dad will back him up on it. Ultimately, he has to learn how to handle confrontations in life. Somewhere along the line, they're going to have to learn what "nobody walks all over you without your permission" means.
It just seems my whole generation was brought up to think that "ball your fist up and teach the asshole a lesson" isn't an option.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
I was about 16 then, trying in vain to sound like a lawyer. Anyway those kids posted pictures a blurred out scanned picture of me from the yearbook, and posted some false information about me, and went to an online game I played and spread the link.. slight damage was done, but whatever, after I sent that email the site was gone within 24 hours, and they replied saying that had been taken care of.
Then again, if those kids knew how to set up a personal server.... DDoS time.
Please direct all bug reports to
This gets lots of laughs, and gives liqudsin the attention he craves. The net effect is to discourage outward signs of intelligence by belittling the "nerds." Ha Ha Ha. You sure are cool.
God forbid anybody is smart in this dumbed-down society.
Pathetic.
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