Children bullying each other online

An interesting article appeared in the Sunday Parade magazine about how kids use technology to hurt and humiliate others.

I see articles like this from time to time and I am constantly amazed by the new ways stupid, nasty children can think of to make other kids miserable:

• Sending anonymous, threatening instant messages and emails.
• Taking secret photos of the victim in the school locker room and posting the photos online.
• Posting nasty messages, lies, etc. on MySpace and other Web sites.
• Posing as the victim to sending fake emails to teachers to get the victim in trouble.
• Stealing a victim’s password to lock him/her out of an email or online account.
• Stealing a victim’s mobile phone to make phony calls, send fake text messages and try to get the victim in trouble.
• Creating ‘hot or not’ voting polls to rank kids as ugly, overweight, unpopular, etc.
• If the aggressor has access to the victim’s home computer, she/he can attempt to infect it with a virus or malware; or do other permanent damage that can affect data the victim’s family has stored on that family computer.

Cyberbullies use e-mail, instant messages (IMs), cell phones, text messages, photos, videos and social networking sites to humiliate and threaten others.

These stupid, idiot children have no concept of the long term damage they are doing.

What makes cyberbullying so easy—and tempting—is the mask of anonymity the Web provides, along with a potentially huge audience … There’s a lack of social norms when children use technology to communicate. Because you can be anonymous, there’s no fear of detection. Even if you identify yourself, you don’t see people’s reactions and realize you have gone too far.

Once something is posted online, it’s out there forever. It gets indexed by the search engines, saved by other people, cached somewhere like Google Cache, Archive.org, etc. and will never be completely wiped out.

Take the example of “the Star Wars Kid.” In private, he was goofing around and video taped himself jumping around with a light saber. His mistake was to return the video equipment to school with the tape still in. Other nasty kids took it, posted it online to humiliate him since he’s overweight and they were jerks. Once the video was in the Internet wilderness, others edited the video to add special effects. Now it’s been viewed by millions and ‘the star’ has had to put up with all this unwanted attention and humiliation.

The Internet is like the bathroom wall. Secrets and privacy don’t exist online.

Parents, watch carefully what your children are doing. Make it clear to them what is not acceptable behavior. Do not give them the tools to create mischief and make other kids miserable.

We do need to know what our kids can do with technology and hold them accountable when they use it unethically.

If you don’t, you will eventually be held accountable. Or worse, the victim may seek revenge to the extreme.