Social Networking Cyber-bullies

If you're new to our site, please consider subscribing to our full RSS feed. Subscribe now, and you will get an offer that's only available to folks who read our feed!

Some would argue that, in order to more rigorously protect children, social networking sites should be more aggressive in their use of age verification. After all, age verification procedures effectively limit access to adult sites; but then, adults have various forms of government or business-issued identifications, such as driver’s licenses and credit cards. The problem in this case, is that there are no similar forms of identification for minors!

So, at base, there’s no accurate way to verify the age of any young internet user who wants to claim another age in order to visit a social networking site.

Most youth, over about the age of 10, know that it’s possible to lie about their age to register on a site governed by age restrictions. And, social networking sites are highly attractive to students in middle school, many of whom are under the age of 13. Many underage students register on these sites, often with the permission of their parents, but then, there are probably just as many who register without their parents’ permission.

It is important to note, when considering the usefulness of available technologies, that students can often use their school district’s internet service (either on-campus, at school, or off-campus, at public libraries) to access online communities or electronic communication services where they can engage in cyberbullying. So, it’s probably a mistake to think that a filtering technology will, or even can, prevent cyber-bullying or trash-texting from happening.

A school district’s filtering software can be set to block access to popular online communities, but a moderately intelligent middle school student can easily set up a home computer system that will provide the capability to circumvent the school computer to get to these sites or simply access a proxy site that will facilitate bypass of a filtering system…

Don’t believe me? Prove it to yourself. Conduct a Google search for yourself on the words bypass Internet filter to see how easy it is for students to find instructions on how to defeat any blocks established by a school district using filtering technology.

And, as if that weren’t already enough to be concerned about, it’s important to remember that students can also engage in cyberbullying by using cell phones or PDAs while at school. Anyone can easily access their online social networking profile using their cell phone.

Now, it appears that most school districts have policies prohibiting students from using cell phones during class, but in many schools, there are active programs teaching students to use personal digital assistants (PDAs) for educational purposes (mathematics, chemistry, descriptive statistics, etc). And, all the while, the prices of these devices are dropping rapidly.

The major emerging concern is how parents and schools will manage student use of technology, when many students have wireless personal digital devices that they use in the classroom for legitimate educational activities — but, that function outside of the school’s filtering environment and can also be used to engage in online social aggression.

In the UK, there has been a growing, and nasty, trend over the last year for teenagers (mainly) to film unprovoked attacks on innocent victims using their cellphones. The resulting video footage or images are then distributed to friends in an almost cult like fashion. This has become known as the happy slapping craze.

I see that the Washington Post is today running a story about online ‘Fight Club’ postings. While these, it would appear, are organized street fights between consenting adults, the worry must surely be that happy slapping will eventually crossover to the online fight club scene…

Tags: cell phone, cell phone number reverse look up, cell trace, social networking, criminal background check

Bullies, Griefers and Plain Old-Fashioned Harassment, Part 3

This article is the last of a three-part discussion on the nature of, and relationship between, cyber-bullies, griefers and the legal concept of harassment.

Because the terms “cyber-bully” and “griefer” are often tossed around interchangeably, I began the first part of our discussion by clarifying the term “griefer,” the second part by clarifying “cyber-bully,” and by explaining (in both cases) when and under which circumstances the two terms were meaningfully distinguished.

I will begin this section by introducing the legal term harassment.
Read more

Bullies, Griefers and Plain Old-Fashioned Harassment, Part 2

This article is the second of a three-part discussion on the nature of, and relationship between, cyber-bullies, griefers and the legal concept of harassment.

Because the terms “cyber-bully” and “griefer” are often tossed around interchangeably, I began the first part of our discussion by clarifying the term “griefer,” and explaining when and under which circumstances the two terms are meaningfully distinguished.
Read more

Bullies, Griefers and Plain Old-Fashioned Harassment, Part 1

This article is the first of a three-part discussion on the nature of, and relationship between, cyber-bullies, griefers and the legal concept of harassment.

Because the terms “cyber-bully” and “griefer” are often tossed around interchangeably, I’d like to clarify when and under which circumstances they are meaningfully distinguished (at least for our purposes), and when they are not. General definitions, set in their proper context, will probably suffice for this purpose. Where such definitions fail to adequately reach, or address, problems involving physical or psychological damages, we will look to the law to determine (a) whether it has come to recognize meaningful distinctions between griefers and cyber-bullies. More importantly, we will look to the law to (b) get a better understanding of the types of remedies it provides where damages are incurred (Note: though it would seem to “round-out” our discussion to lie it alongside an actual case study, our blog format is not suited for such elaborations . . . so anyway . . . ).

Let me begin with a general clarification of the term “griefer.”
Read more