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I agree though finding that person responsible is pretty impossible. You can't be sure who is who with websites like this one in question. This wont be the last place to experience bullying and not everything written can be modded. How would you know if someone completely separate was bullying the person online or it be a situation where the bullying could have gone on for a while outside of a website with a person who knows the victim in real life? What i'm trying to say i think nobody's experience of cyber bulling is the same and i think there is a lot more to incidents like this one that we don't know about.
That attachment is a screen grab of the ask.fm settings where you can change options in order to deny anonymous questions. Also shows the black list of users you have well, erm blacklisted. Two clicks from the main screen.
I'm actually going to see someone tonight who has been on the receiving end, and the advice she'll get from me is the same I give everyone. Switch the fucking thing off. Ask.fm is the most pointless website around, why the fuck would anyone log on, ask a question and expect to get a decent answer from a "community" of brainless morons???
I hate to say it but from what i've read the girl in the original story "fed the trolls" so to speak, she insisted on replying and engaging with them, thus fanning the flames.
There are issues with online activity that makes realife bullying worse. In my day I left the bullying at the school gates, it didn't come home, but now it's more constant. But the same principle applies: turn it off.
Sorry, I didn't mean blocking the website, I meant tracing the offenders.
http://www.beatbullying.org/static/cm/pdfs/2013_08_07.pdf
Well yes, but you get a court order asking for the information and threaten the website with blocking should they not give it. If you're not willing to cooperate with UK law enforcement, then you can't operate your website in the UK.
:yes: And presumably it's the implications of traffic withdrawing that has led advertisers to pull out, which will hurt.
Problem is, sometimes it's quite difficult. If that website is one of the only places you go online, it can be a bit scary to leave ALL that behind and have nothing. I experienced similar bullying as a teenager online. Took me a YEAR to finally have the courage to break away from the forum in question and the friends I'd made there and very hard not to give into the temptation to just 'have a peek'.
Besides... sometimes you just want to find a way to befriend or 'win' over the trolls when you're young. Even if you know it doesn't work. And then you slip over into the 'well I must deserve this' frame of mind...
Just... my POV on why it's sometimes hard to 'just leave'.
I wouldn't have wanted to be banned by mum from playing online games though - why should I get punished even more as well as people being mean. Online games now like League of Legends allow you to easily report people, and they incentivise service users through a 'tribunal' system to actually go and review every single reported case and take action. It works extremely well.
Obviously, that's not going to work for twitter - the whole point is that within two minutes I can set up an account and start tweeting @davidcameroon you're a #stupid #slut #gokillyourself. Their whole model is to be simple, easy, unrestricted, short, sweet, kissmequick, throwaway messages. It's not in twitter's interest to try to put more obstacles in the way.
I don't know enough about askfm but it seems to be a similar sort of problem, they want more users, they will never introduce any 'hampering' measures that reduce the amount of users they get.
Personally at work I actually deal with user-generated content and literally everything that goes on our site is moderated. Ultimately we are actually responsible for that. So if twitter or askfm is posting racist tweets, or even insults, twitter technically as a 'publisher' is potentially liable. I think email comes under the provision of mail law which kind of includes 'dont sue the messenger' clauses, but PMs / DMs I'm not sure if they do.
Technically the law on publishing offensive (or infringing) web content, is that as long as you remove it when notified you are in the clear. Is that bar too low? A newspaper would be fined no doubt if it had a racist joke in the 'submitted' section, yet a website owner won't as long as they remove it when you tell them.
True. But don't you have to take some responsibility for your own well being too? I help moderate a forum which has some 1 million users registered. There's one person there who is constantly bullied and expects the site time to deal with it. After months and months of this going on, we had a discussion and agreed that the only option was to give him a local ban meaning he couldn't access a certain of the forum where the bullying had taken place.
He complained about this and made the mods out to be bad people and we were punishing him. Except we weren't. We were trying to help him. When his ban was lifted, the same thing started again - he'd get bullied, reply to the bullies and moan at the mods for doing nothing. The mods are volunteers and most of us are either students or work full time.
We can't see every single post and partly rely on other users to report unwanted behaviour to us.
Oh I know that. Not saying the site's management/moderators should be 100% responsible for it. I'm a chatroom moderator, we've had to ban people who kept coming back for their own good (as well as for rules they broke). Hell, we even had someone make a second account just because they were that unwilling to leave.
I was just giving a possible reason as to why it's sometimes hard to leave a site behind just like that.
Not a definitive answer on that, but the parents are calling for it.
I know it isn't easy to leave a website where you have friends or all your friends are on. But there is always a certain responsibility to look after yourself because nobody else will. It's not blaming the girl to question why she didn't talk to anyone, I totally get why she didn't, but that isn't the fault of the website owner.
Sites that report this are saying that this means she sent them to herself, although it could be anyone in the same network. That includes anyone in her house (or nearby, if there was an unsecured wifi network or one that got hacked) or possibly the school, if she was posting from there instead.
Just as most children are sexually abused by someone they know, so the bullied know their bullies.
Edit: Please see attached PDF for the story.Attachment not found.
:yes: And it has so much more power coming from someone you know; think of the emotional turmoil of rumours that start online ending up at school,and the info that schoolfriends have to bully you with.