Tips for responding to cyberbullys

www.cyberbullying.us also has tips for responding to cyberbullying here because tips for prevention can only go so far until is unfortunately starts. Once it does start the victim needs to know how to handle the bully and the situation. So many people who are cyberbullied choose not to tell anyone about what's happening because they are scared it could make it worse. Minor situations the victim can ignore the bully but if it's a severe case telling an authority figure could be the only way to start making the situation better. Now that cyberbullying has really be brought to light and people know about it it's being taken seriously.

Tips for prevention

www.cyberbullying.us has a page of tips for teens for using the internet and the prevention of cyberbullying. I think that these sites need to be pushed more and advertised more in schools and other places that pre-teens and teens visit regularly so they can become more aware of the appropriate ways to act on the internet.

One of the tips is to pause before you post and there are so many times where people post things out of anger and don't think what they are saying who they are saying it to and the effect that that it could have. It goes along with the saying "think before you speak." The same rules that go for talking to someone in person also with talking to people through social media sites.

Facts about cyberbullying

Facts
The link to the website www.dosomething.org has 11 facts about cyberbullying and the one that stuck out most to me is "The psychological and emotional outcomes of cyber bullying are similar to real-life bullying outcomes, except for the reality that with cyber bullying there is often no escape. School ends at 3 p.m., while the Internet is available all the time." I think that this is one the most important things that people need to realize about cybebullying. There really is no escape and I think that we will start to see that down the line that the kids who were effected will have some serious side effects unfortunately. It really does take a toll on people when they feel like everywhere they turn they are getting attacked.

What's being done

The government is starting to get involved in the cyberbullying problems and I found a couple things on ncsl.org that addressed cyberbullying but also cyberstalking and cyberharrassment. The two webpages also had each states policy against each of these problems.
This website states a clear difference between cyberstalking and cyberharassment and cyberbullying. Cyberbullying is more school related between peers and the policies that states have are different for cyberbullying.
The cyberstalking/cyberharassment policies are here
The cyberbullying policies are here

Cyberbullies: Myspace vs Facebook

Emily Bazelon wrote an article on slate.com about the responsibilities that Facebook and Myspace have when it comes to preventing and handling cyberbullying. My opinion is that they do have a responsibility to monitor and control what gets posted and what profiles and accounts are created daily.
Bazelon found that Myspace had a much better plan of attack against cyberbully's and people who create fake profiles. The privacy settings on Myspace are much more safer for younger children and allow them to block comments and other users more easily then Facebook. Myspace also has people who closely monitor accounts.
Bazelon also explained that after looking at Facebook and talking to their chief security monitor she found out that Facebook doesn't really do much when it comes to answering users about problems with cyberbullies and they rely on Facebook users to report fake or offensive accounts.
For more information the article is here

Cyberbullies revealed

After a recent court case in Britain has ended with the victim of cyberbullies knowing exactly who targeted her through Facebook.
An article on technorati.com by Adi Gaskell detailed the story of a girl who was harassed online and decided to go to court and the ruling was that Facebook had to give up the names and other identification information of the four people that targeted Nicola Brookes and Brookes now intends to prosecute each of them.
This article and court case opens a new door to cyberbullying because now that one case has ruled that the identification of cyberbullies had to be revealed many more people could take their cyberbullying cases to court hoping for similar verdicts. 
I think that in the long run this could help control cyberbullying if there is the threat that the cyberbullies identity could be revealed.
The article can be found here

Cyber bullies don't just target adolescents

I wanted to find examples about older people being victims of cyber bullies and what I found was very shocking and not what I expected at all.

This article from www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat by Nomia Iqbal shares a story from a teacher who quit her job and become clinically depressed because of things students were posting about her on Facebook and Twitter. In the article the teacher shares some of the awful things that students posted on her Facebook and how they used previous tweets from her twitter to make up stories. The worst part is when she went to other teachers they did nothing, they told her to "toughen up" and not to let things get to her. In the end she was going to get investigated because of the things students wrote about her and quit before that happened.

This story is very scary for many reasons by mainly because she received no help from any teacher or administrators. I think that is an indicator that nothing is being done about cyber bullying in that particular district on any level if not even a teacher can get help. It all has to start with the teachers and the students see them as examples and it's really disgusting that, that district didn't stand up for this teacher and help her out.

Stories like this make me want to cut off social media all together once I get a teaching job because it's really not worth the trouble that people go through.

Social Media fights back against cyberbullying

My last blog post discussed a few ways to prevent cyberbullying and I wanted to find other people's opinions on ways to prevent this issue. I came across an article on Socialnomics.net by Mary Alison Qualman Cyber Bullying Rises, by Social Media Fights Back and she brought up something very interesting almost too simple to overlook. Use social media to fight cyber bullying on social media.

Qualman talked about how a company has set up an application on Facebook called Find Help that allows Facebook users to report cyber bullying and connects them to people who can help them if they are victims. We are all aware of the videos that have come out called "it gets better" and there is a website where celebrities and regular citizens have made videos shedding light on ways to help people deal with cyber bullying and regular bullying.

Personally I see this method of cyber bully prevention as the most effective way because most adolescents spend a lot of time on social media sites to begin with so if help is right there they might be more apt to use that rather then talking to an adult or someone else.

Cyberbullying prevention strategies

With so many ways for people to access the internet it's really difficult for adolescents to avoid cyberbullying and preventing it completely is very difficult for parents. An article  went over the strategies that can be taken to prevent the amount of cyberbullying.

This article was written by the nation crime prevention council and many of their options seemed to have good intentions but I don't know how realistic they are. The article kept mentioning monitoring the computer usage of teens and looking at the websites they frequently visit but now that most adolescents have smart phones, tablets or laptops it makes it very difficult for parents to know exactly what their kids are doing every time they are on the internet.

Talking to teens about their internet usage was also discussed and letting them know how they act on the internet has an effect on people and their are right and wrong ways to go about communicating with different people. I think that, that might be a more effective way because when teens are educated on the dangers of cyberbullying before it occurs they will already have that knowledge in the back of their mind.

Can we find a quick fix?

My last blog addressed the dangers of all of the social media sites that we have and how they have added to the bullying. I wanted to see what studies have been done about cyberbullying and the effects that it has one pre-teens and teens that become targets.

I found an article  by Corinne David-Ferdon and Marci Feldman Hertz explaining the health problems that adolescents who become subjected by cyberbullying suffer from. Something that I didn't even think about that has a huge impact on research and data collection about this topic is how little information we have about cyberbullying because it really hasn't been around for a long enough for researchers to collect a sufficient amount of data or done many observations. I started to think about bullying that occurred when I was in elementary, middle and high school and I only could remember my peers being bullied online around 8th grade and into high school. That wasn't even 10 years ago so in the research world that is an incredibly short amount of time to be able to collect accurate data and results about the effects of cyberbullying. I forget that aspect about cyberbullying and I think many other people do as well because it seemed to pop up very quickly and now everyone is scrambling trying to fix it.

Campaigns have popped up all over that are desperately trying to stop cyberbullying but it's such a hard thing to track and maintain because social media has exploded and become virtually impossible to ignore. The article talks about that and how that could potentially have a devastating effect on the victims because everywhere they turn they could be subject to harassment thanks to smart phones, ipads, kindles etc... That is also why the new technology is looked at to be so revolutionary. 

With technology growing at such a rapid pace which also means finding a way to stop cyberbullying will get more and more difficult because there will always be new ways for adolescents to get bullied. In the article David-Ferdon and Hertz said that a lot of cyberbullying doesn't even happen in school because the internet allows people to interact with anybody which also makes it difficult to study and track. With technology growing at such a rapid speed how can we expect to slow down cyberbullying?

The downside to social media sites

Being harassed online

When facebook, twitter and other social media sites exploded all people talked about was the good it was going to do for out society and how convenient and easy it was easy to stay connected with people from all over the United States and the world. But just like anything else that we have, social media started to show it's ugly head when people started to get bullied via the internet using social media sites. Now cyber bullying has totally spiraled out of control and it seems to be worse then ever, that could also be because it's getting more attention then ever now. In the poll talked about in the article 56% of teens and young adults said that they were bullied online which was up 50% from a similar survey taken in 2009.

We are all aware of the recent news stories about teens killing themselves because they were being severely bullied by classmates both in and out of school. The very aspects of social media that people were raving about have had some major downsides because now these kids who are subject to bullying in school can't escape it when they go home. The effects have proven to be extremely devastating to the kids who are being bullied and their families. Is the convenience factor of being able to communicate with anyone anywhere who has an internet connection really as great as we all saw it to be or is it too good to to be true?

Why is twitter so capitivating?

The article that I am blogging about is here 
This article was written almost 3 years ago and I was interested to see what is said being an avid twitter user myself. As Johnson stated in the beginning of the article I was also very apprehensive to join the twitter community myself and it took me a few tries to get into the groove of twitter because I really did not initially understand why people were so concerned about other people's lives and what they were doing at that exact moment. I soon learned that it is much more then that and can really captivate my attention for long periods of time. In the article it mentions the same thing, that twitter has an "unsuspected depth." I can scroll through my timeline and see what my friends and celebrities are doing at the exact time that I am possible doing something completely different. I think that in itself is very interesting and keeps me refreshing my timeline to see new tweets.
Another part of the twitter that is mentioned in this article is the hashtag (3) usage and how that can be used to communicate with people all around the world. Johnson talks about while at a conference he saw a conversation via twitter between the people who attended the conference turn into a global conversation with people all over...taking it from a private conversation to a public conversation about education reform. I do use hashtags and I love the idea behind them but this was the first time that I had thought about them being used to turn a private conversation into a public conversation.  I started to think about all the inside jokes that my friends and I turned into hashtags on twitter and that immediately turned them into public knowledge...people may not have understood the jokes though. All of those tweets back and forth to each other keep them all in one place somewhere in the twitter world in cyberspace. Even though conversations such as these can be kept on facebook, twitter groups all the conversations around one hashtag in one place and clicking on hashtag links and reading what other people have said about the hashtags too. That is in itself I think is huge because there arent many places where conversations can occur with those kinds of influences and in that kind of environment.
The end of the article talks about how we are in tough times right now economically and people are figuring out new ways to communicate with each other. That is very true and I find it almost like a comic relief. Using twitter we can all see that we aren't alone when it comes to our thoughts and feelings because there are so many tweets that get favored and retweeted even about the simplest things like..."I love pizza." All of that shows how twitter has changes even since this article was written 3 years ago. Twitter is constantly changing and revamping the website and the apps on smartphones to make it easier for people to communicate with each other.