Growing a Thicker Skin Is the Upside of Being Cyberbullied

"It has shook me to the core."

That is how +Stephanie Frasco describes being cyberbullied by an adult.

It's true that even if your intentions are good in doing, saying, or sharing something, there are people who will rake you over the coals for it. Haters hide behind the keyboard, lying in wait, for the sole purpose of ruining someone's day and there is no amount of explanation or counter-argument that will be good enough to get them to stop or take it back.

Stephanie responded to the web by posting this blog piece, to which her key advice is to just play nice.

That's probably the best advice ever. By fighting hate with love, venom with inspiration, we can change the Internet for the positive, one post at a time.

The Definition of an Adult Cyberbully

When cyberbullying happens to adults, it does more than affect a person's psyche. It seriously harms or destroys a business. Business cyberbullying is bigger than you might know.

+Michael Nuccitelli, Psy.D. describes a cyberbully as an +iPredator, someone engaging in cyber terrorism. If you think that is too harsh a description, try being on the receiving end.

Online predators can be anyone: a disgruntled client, someone who didn't get the job you advertised, a former employee, a family member, or someone you have never met who just decided that you would be their target for no reason whatsoever.

The Bullying Statistics website lists five character traits of an adult bully:

1. Narcissistic: lacks empathy and relishes in knowing they have caused you pain.
2. Impulsive: lacks impulse control and will troll on the fly when something sticks in their craw. Sometimes their behavior may be unintentional, but they are driven by their emotions.
3. Physical: they may physically harm their target or someone related to their target, or just the threat of physical harm lands them in this category.
4. Verbal: the predator demeans, humiliates, or uses verbal language to disparage their target. This form of bullying can be more devastating than physical bullying.
5. Secondary: the ones who do the piling on. They didn't initiate the post, but they keep it going with fervor.

Dr. Nuccitelli also lists 42 examples of cyberbullying.

If you are an adult who is the target, both personally and business, of an adult cyberbully, you are not alone and there are resources you can access for help.

Debt, Collections, Economy, and Unemployment Can Lead to Cyberbullying

When the economy plummeted into the financial abyss in 2008, for some, it took a year or so for the real impact to show its ugly face.

There may have been a slight upturn after 2012, but the damage was so great that many North Americans have yet to recover.

It's more than about losing a job or taking a bath in the stock market. Whole industries nosedived off a cliff. The economic tank coincided with digital technology forcing the world to rethink how it does business and to reshape its ways of communicating.

People didn't just lose their jobs, those positions became obsolete. 

What happens when as a business person, your expenses exceed your income because your industry is either dying or reinventing itself? You lay off your staff, but you're still drowning in a world of debt you incurred during the year the floor collapsed. There is no unemployment insurance, no cushion for small businesses. Even a bankruptcy costs money.

If the employee was lucky enough to collect unemployment insurance, by the time the insurance ran out or when two years were up, most still had trouble finding a position for numerous reasons: ageism, those jobs they were qualified for no longer existed, too many candidates for the same job, logistics, lack of training.

With only part-time and piecemeal contract work available, the underemployed's household bills pile up and food and rent begins to take priority over all other bills. People will use their credit cards to pay for their utility bills until the juggling from here to there catches up with them. 

A third to one half of the U.S. population has debt in collections, according to +USA TODAY. +The Economist reports that student debt is 7% of the U.S. GDP. In Canada, the +The Globe and Mail reports "On a per-capita basis, household net worth rose to a record $232,200."

One industry that has grown in this environment is debt collections. While the business may be a necessary evil to our society, some of the individuals working the files may be practicing illegal behavior in their desperate attempt to close a case file.

They may use abusive tactics by phone and email, but there are some who take it a step further and publicly try to shame a debtor by disclosing their debt across the Internet. The laws are similar in both Canada and the United States when it comes to prohibitive debt collection practices. It is laid out in both countries' debt collection acts.

The piling on by collections when a person is down and out is bad enough. Abusive behavior is inexcusable. Know your rights.

5 Tips to Manage Your Trolls

1.

Here are five steps to manage your Internet trolls:

1. Post a policy on all of your social media sites that you will not tolerate bullying, spammers, and abusive trolls that hijack your feeds. Warn them that their comments will be deleted and they may be blocked.

2. Set up notifications for the comments on your feeds so that you can address an abusive or spam post once it hits your social media.

3. Assess if the post is hateful, spam, or just an adverse opinion and warrants being deleted or kept.

4. Delete the post if it doesn't serve a meaningful discussion.

5. If the user shows up again to hijack your feed in the same way, take them out of your media. If you suspect they are not a real person (a phisher) or if they've been abusive in any way, then don't hesitate to block and report them.

#IllRideWithYou

Terrible tragedies can bring out the best in people.

A gunman held people hostage in a Sydney coffee shop, which resulted in the death of two innocents. Because of the perpetrator's cultural makeup, the event created an environment of anti-Muslim sentiment. To protect herself, a woman took off her hijab, but was told to put it back on because that person would walk with her. A simple gesture that became a viral movement.

Most of us who use common sense know that the actions of one person does not make a race or demographic. #IllRideWithYou celebrates the people who choose to turn tragedy into something positive.

When we collectively disregard the hate in lieu of love, WE decide how we want to live. We don't allow the bullies to reign. We don't even acknowledge them. Instead, we can make the world a better place, one gesture at a time.

‘It’s F–king Stolen’

Yes, Sony was hacked and it was bad. Do you want to know what is worse? The media publishing the material they received as a result of the hack.

Just because it is Hollywood and too good to pass up on learning the dirty little secrets behind closed doors, somehow it is okay for even the most trusted news sources to publish private emails and material for all to see because it involves A-list public figures.

Target and Home Depot were hacked, too. Did the media publish the social insurance numbers and internal communications from those executives? Will they do it if a bank or insurance company gets hacked? 

Seth Rogan is right. It stinks and with regards to the material being published: "It's F--king Stolen."

This is no different than publishing the hacked photos from the private files (that were not publicly shared by the subjects) of Jennifer Lawrence and other celebrities. It's slimy and if hacking is a crime, perhaps publishing hacked material is also a crime. 

Sony Takes A Bit of Heat Over Its Hacking Scandal

It hasn't been a good week for Sony Pictures Entertainment, especially for its upper management. Due to a serious hack, which may have been done months ago, intellectual property details and embarrassing emails have been leaked publicly.

Media outlets could be criticized for piling on and furthering the impact of the hack by publishing some of the more salacious details. If the hack didn't involve A-list entertainment, and instead the Coca-Cola or Chevron hierarchy, would the intimate details be released? Maybe. Maybe not.

Here are some of the numerous story links about the hack that have flooded my inbox:

Lisa Kudrow Rips Sony Execs Over Leaked Emails

Sony Hackers Leak New Data, Threaten 'Christmas Gift' To Put Studio In 'Worst State'

Amy Pascal on Whether She's So Damaged She Can No Longer Lead Sony

Sony Hackers Flash Disturbing New Warning on Staffers' Computers

Sony Employees' Medical Records Among Hacked Data

Sony Had Evidence of Server Hack in February According to New Leaked Emails

New Sony Hack Attack Theory Suggests North Korea Was Involved But Had Insider Help

No Interviews at 'The Interview' Premiere Amid Sony Hacking Fallout

Sony Hackers Sent Top Execs Threatening Email Days Before Attack

Sony Hack Attack: FBI to Hold Employee Cybersecurity Awareness Briefings on Studio Lot

Celebrity Business and Cyberbullies

Something about a part of this discussion makes me squirm. It seems like they are blaming the victim because they feel hurt about being cyberbullied. 

There is no one-size-fits-all for how a person FEELS when they discover they are the target of a cyberbully. Celebrities feel the same pain as the rest of us feel. One cannot just get over it. It is a process. 

While there is some good in this clip, part of it doesn't sit right.

By the way, cyberbullying isn't a trend. It's a reality.