Being a Cyberbully is Easy

Adult Internet users who self-reported cyber-bullying, by relationship to the bully, 2009

Look no further than the comment feed to any major source article, Facebook page post, or YouTube video. Vile and contempt are everywhere. 

It is almost as if there is real money in being as mean as you can on the Internet. 

In reality, when an adult business owner is the target of a cyberbully, it does involve real money...in lost business. 

Being that bully is so easy to do that even the well-intentioned have worn those shoes at one time or the other.

This post by Stephen Hill of the Squamish Chief tells you how easy it is.

Bakery Example of Business Cyberbullying

A bully wakes up one day and decides to rain toxin at a small business establishment that is only trying to make good cupcakes. The only thing this business did to trigger this abuse was exist.

The bully takes to the Internet, initiates posts, trolls feeds, and engages a campaign of hate against the business and its owner.

This is the face of business cyberbullying. Sometimes the cyberbully is known to the target. Other times, the actual face may be hidden behind an anonymous avatar.

In the case of the Sweet Ambrosia Bake Shoppe, the campaign of hate has been at least two years in the making.

Canada's New Cyberbullying Law

On March 9, 2015, a new law will come into affect that will give law enforcement more teeth to charge cyberbullies in Canada. Bill C-13's controversy is that it will also give the government more surveillance powers.

+Allan Oziel describes the law: it will be an offence to knowingly publish, distribute, transmit, sell, make available or advertise an “intimate image” of a person without that person’s consent, where there was a reasonable expectation of privacy.

Under the new law, an +iPredator can be forced to remove content and stay off the Internet AND have their devices confiscated. Offenders can receive up to five years imprisonment.

The law only applies to images broadcast on all forms of media, whether it be photograph, print, or video. So if, say a cloud server was hacked and private unpublished nude photographs were shared publicly and subsequently reshared, the individuals posting and resharing could be prosecuted under this law.

There does not appear to be a statute of limitations with this act as there are with the other cyberbullying crimes, which fall under libel, harassment, and collection laws.

Here is a legislative summary of C-13.

In order to prosecute under any law, important for businesses and individuals to document their bully's trail of toxin.

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.

Celebrity Phonegate

Did she or didn't she?

After a volatile episode of The Celebrity Apprentice, the question on viewer's lips is: Did Kenya steal Vivica's phone?

To fill you in, there has been tension between the women from the get-go. Suspicion comes in when before the team hits the boardroom to learn their fate in episode six. Circumstantial evidence was broadcast by Kenya herself when she looked into the camera and boasted, "Little do they know I have some tricks up my sleeve."

Is this tweet also an admission of guilt?

Sure, this all makes for good television drama on one of network television's most popular show. But seriously? If your coworker stole your phone and hinted about it in a boast, then suddenly a derogatory tweet showed up as seemingly posted by you, wouldn't you call your lawyer?

Kenya may not have stolen Vivica's phone and perhaps it's just a strange coincidence. But if she did, there is a term for this type of behavior and it does also come in the form of a hack: cyberbullying.

It is a crime. It may not be named as such in your state, provincial, or federal legislation. It will be dressed up as theft, harassment, and defamation libel, but it is still a crime.

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.