We're Human Beings, Man

This is heartbreaking. You may remember Paris Jackson as the "leave Britney alone" girl when she posted a YouTube video about all the Internet comments Britney Spears was getting for some of her behavior.

She received so much abuse over her public fame that she tried to commit suicide. She was 14 years old. Fortunately, she did not succeed.

What Paris did do was take a hiatus from social media. Upon her return, the abuse resumed. For God's sake, people. She's only 18 now.

But it doesn't matter if she's 18, 38, or 78, nobody deserves the hate trolling that some think the Internet has given them license for. A pox on all of these assholes. 

The world needs more caring people like Paris Jackson, so leave Paris alone! 

When a Bad Decision Goes Horribly Wrong. The Tiziana Catone Story.

September 13, 2016: a beautiful 31-year-old Italian woman is dead.

Tiziana Catone lived a public hell. She tried twice to end her pain, but finally succeeded on try number three. A desperate plea for help for a system that could not save her.

It all started with a sex tape, one that she willingly made, and then sent to a couple of friends. It was a mistake she could never take back.

Almost immediately, the tape was posted online, reshared, and viewed over a million times -- without her knowledge and without her consent. There were t-shirts, smartphone covers ... a serious marketing campaign was created at her expense, to which she never saw a dime.

Tiziana was mortified. She did everything she could to get her life back. She tried moving, changing her identity, but the notoriety followed her to the ends of the earth.

She won a "Right to Be Forgotten" ruling and the video and all of its chemtrails were ordered offline. It didn't work and the courts invoiced her 20,000 euros for her efforts.

She hung herself at her aunt's house.

Even in death, the bullying continues. Yes, she may have been naive to think such a video might stay private. But if you really look at the backlash against her, would it be so horrific if she were a man? (Hint: the lover in the video didn't have to change his identity. He doesn't have his name up in lights, or had to go to court to fight for a Right to Be Forgotten order.)

Tiziana Catone saw no way out and felt that society actually bought her the rope. Her life didn't matter. Why? Over a sex tape? What about Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian? They made their careers from a sex tape. Why don't you hear about the man getting beat up online about his involvement?

For all the Tiziana Catones out there, I hope there is another way. Perhaps if one can build up their personal shield to deflect all the bullshit, they can eventually call out the haters and expose the hypocrisy of this type of cyberbullying. In the case of Tiziana's family, what they should do is sue the bastards for royalties.

If the cybercriminals can't be held accountable on criminal law, then maybe it's time to get them to pay up from the commercial side.

Leave Leslie Alone!

Bitch, please! No, not Leslie Jones. I'm talking to you, the Twitter trolls. 

Like, really? You can't find a life of your own that you have to invest a group assault on one of the best female comedians of our time? Shame on you. 

Sadly, no amount of calling out or shaming a Twitter troll will change their behavior. If anything, it ignites them, because in their meaningless friend-less lives, their only source of being is to make others miserable. A pox on your houses.

I mean, have you even watched Saturday Night Live? Is this a woman you want to challenge in some dark alley known as your existence? She will beat the ever-loving crap out of you and not even have to stand up to do it.

That's probably the point. Chances are, the assholes behind these attacks are intimidated by the mere fact a woman exists, so in order for them to feel like men, they have to tear "the little woman" to shreds in the most heinous way possible: a rape of her digital footprint. They also know the chances of being persecuted are slim, if not none, because law enforcement is already light years behind technology and it will take them centuries just to catch up to now.

Closing a Twitter or Facebook account, turning off the computer and mobile device is not going to solve anything. The pricks are still online wreaking their wand of toxins, whether you see it or not. 

All you can do is be true to yourself, carry on with life as best you can. Yes, your footprint may have the smear (I speak from experience of a cyberbully troll) for a long time, and maybe forever. Women have a much harder time to recoup than men because, you know, misogyny. But still, we can only move forward, try and stay positive, live our lives, and beat the shit out of them digitally by posting positive shit to try and drown out their chasm of cancerous crap. 

The rest of us can help by sending digital love to the target to help lift their spirits.

Nowhere Safe

Just because you can doesn't mean you should. That is the problem with the ease at which the Internet and all of its tools can play into the hands of those who seek revenge and incite mob mentality. 

Bullies bully to make themselves feel like they are more important than they are. They use the Internet because it can do the most damage to someone's reputation. It takes a special kind of psychopath to create an account in someone else's name and use it to publish their own thoughts, which are contrary to the person they are impersonating. It masks the psychopath's crime and it makes the innocent a target.

This is the true story behind the movie Nowhere Safe (2014), directed by Brian Brough and written by Brittany Wiscombe.

Ashley Evans (Danielle Chuchran) is a good student who becomes the target of two mean girls who create a plan to impersonate her and make her a cyberbully. Things get so ugly, that Ashley and her mother, who is a teacher her daughter's school, Julie Johnson (Natasha Henstridge) are forced into a midnight move to a new community where they hope to rebuild with a clean slate.

It's a lesson on choices. Do you run or do you fight? Ashley and her mother chose to run. When the past finds its way into their new lives, where the whole nasty journey looks like it may continue, they choose a different route. Ashley finds her voice and ultimately gets her life back in the process.

Just Joking Doesn't Give You A Cyberbully-Free Card

Kendall Jenner

It really doesn't matter how famous, infamous, or anonymous you are. "Just joking" is not a viable excuse for your bullying behavior.

Like her or not, Kendall Jenner's story is just one example of what many people experience, whether you're a celebrity or not. It only takes one lame-ass comment to trigger the Twitter trolls into mob mentality and group troll an account or hashtag.

Stephanie Seymour has modeled for many of the high end fashion magazines during the course of her career. Like all of us, her past has had its ups and downs, both professionally and personally. She recently called out Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid, inferring that they are not really models, even though they are being professionally paid to do that job. Her comment was to conclude that the term "supermodel" did not apply to the new girls and rather that they were the "B***hes of the moment!"

Jenner called her out and Seymour's apology somewhere along the way included the "just joking" scenario. 

If you have to use the term "just joking" to justify a remark you'd like to take back, maybe just apologize and just leave it at that.

Cyberbullying = Mental Rape

Candace Cameron Bure said it. She said what many, if not all, targets feel: cyberbullying feels like rape.

Digging deeper, Karma of the Poodle describes mental rape in a Yahoo discussion board as: "... where you are raped of your common knowledge or knowledge of your current life and have it taken from you and replaced with someone else's information done out of fear and abuse without your consent and willing participation."

Mental rape is being raped by words and images, which is the quintessential behavior of a cyberbully. A person is psychologically traumatized and it is not uncommon for depression and post-traumatic stress to set in as a result.

When someone has their digital footprint vandalized and destroyed, they experience mental rape. There is no other way to more accurately define it.

So what do rape victims have to do in order to start the healing process? The very same things a victim of cyberbullying must do.

Pandora's Project offers some advice in this post: What do do if you have been raped.

1. Find a safe environment to decompress and share your experience.
2. Solicit help from someone who has been through it or an expert who can guide you.
3. Do what you need to do to document, block, and delete your cyberbully and his or her friends from your life.
4. Report it (backed up by your physical screenshots and documentation) to the proper authorities, such as Facebook, Twitter, the police.
5. Find your way back to going about your business through empowerment. Surround yourself with positive and supporting people, find links and sites to help you expel the toxins.
6. Know that you are not alone. It doesn't matter what you've done, it does not give another person license to cyberbully or post trash about you. You are not responsible for other people's behavior.

A Girl Like Her

This story is etched in our mind, even before computers or the Internet.

I can see the clique bitch and her sidekick in my head today, nearly 50 years later: Susan and Doris. Their mission: to marginalize anyone who was not inside their little group. If they knew you liked a boy, they would recruit him. They'd invite you to parties sometimes, but you were always made to feel like an outsider, a freak. Yea, this 2015 movie, A Girl Like Her, made me grateful there was no Internet in those days. I was lucky.

Like the tagline says, A Girl Like Her is the story of millions. While this blog is mostly about business and adult cyberbullies, there is a correlation. If Mom or Dad is a bully, they imprint that behavior on their kids.

This movie ultimately shows how much the bully and the victim have in common, besides being linked to each other through torment. They both tend to have low self-esteem. The bully puffs herself up like a blowfish to make herself seem more important than she feels. The target might be a loner, an introvert who second guesses every move she makes.

Writer and Director Amy S. Weber has done a pretty good job of portraying this as organically as it can happen. It may be fiction, but you feel like you are watching the real deal, live and up front.

Everyone needs to see this movie, especially if you are a parent, a target, a bully, or any of their friends.

 

The Allow Comments Button: Is It A Two-edged Sword?

We know that Twitter and Reddit can turn ugly over a single moment or hashtag and that Wordpress can turn into an onslaught of spam, that YouTube can be the King of Mean.

What is it about being able to comment on the Internet that turns people into assholes?

Comments on YouTube can be so bad, that Google tried to force its users to have to log into a Google + account, thinking that showing their identity might curb the nasty. Well, it worked so well that it was announced in July 2015, the alliance was over.

Mean-spirited comments even has the psychology community trying to assess some of the reasons. Anonymity may be one reason, but still. How many of us are inclined to set up fake profiles just for the sake of harassing someone?

While there are some mean comments that actually come out as humorous, but there are some that are so hateful that you have to flag the users as a cyberbully, block, and ban them from all of your media.

You don't have to look far to find a mean comment. There are many taking to video to read them aloud. Besides exposing these bullies for who they are (and why do they all write like they are illiterate?), the act of reading them diminishes their power.

Fired Employee Orchestrates Cyberbullying Campaign

It's kind of ironic when someone involved in law recruiting opts to become a cyberbully. That's exactly what has happened in this story.

Harrison Barnes is a law recruiter who hired a couple of fellows way back, even though they had been fired from their previous jobs. After discovering that their recruiting practices were underhanded and would put the company at risk, the two were fired. They have since used a website to besmear Barnes, who has responded through the legal route, as well as creating a post of his own.

This isn't a unique case, and it unfortunately won't be the last.

The Internet is full of disgruntled employees, who have taken to cock their mouse as the new firearm when deciding to seek their revenge.

I met a real estate agent who has experienced a similar online trashing from someone he didn't hire. It doesn't have to take much to set off a bully. But they will continue to test you, enlist others to set up traps, and do their best to destroy your digital life.

All we can do in response is to carry on as if they don't exist. Engaging them adds coal to the furnace, but ignoring them and finding a way to succeed and live happily, despite their best efforts to destroy you, is the best revenge you can bestow on them.


 

Unfriended

This is a real-life digital mystery, even though it's fiction.

Let's face it. It is a fantasy of anyone who has ever been cyberbullied.

It starts with a video of a girl passed out at a party, and the video, including suggestive viewpoints, was posted on YouTube. As what might happen in real life, there is a piling on of shaming and laughing at the subject. Her response was to post a video of her own: of her shooting herself in the head.

On the first anniversary of her death, a group of friends, who were part of the shaming, are trolled in a Skype call by an unknown guest who is using the dead girl's account. One by one, each of the group gets picked off and murdered online for all to see. The mystery person seems to be in control of their devices and they can't shut them off.

It's revenge on steroids.

While this movie only received one star in the cable description, I thought it deserved at least two and a half. 

Anyone who lives online like I do, who communicates mostly through video chat and Facebook, will not be able to look away. The entire movie takes place inside a Skype call and a Facebook chat. If you live in that world, you'll be able to relate.

It's a brilliant way to capture the essence of how this story line might impact the characters. The aesthetics could be better in that it was difficult to read the screenshots.

There may be a lot of people who don't understand the concept of this screenplay, not because of a generational gap, but because of the digital-analog gap. If you use your phone simply for telephone calls, you may not get this movie, outside of the creepy terrorizing part. 

But for the targets of cyberbullies, we can only dream.

Cyberbully, the Movie

Adults sometimes forget that a teenager's world view is much smaller than theirs. For the child, school, family, and friends are their world, with an emphasis on friends. These friends are most likely people they've met in school, so their world is even smaller.

When the Cliquesters zero on a target, it's fast and furious and a group assault. It's a mob mentality as friends join enemies to pile on. Most know the mean rumors aren't true, but that doesn't seem to matter. Everyone acts as if they are true. What makes it worse is when the key instigator is a fake profile that helps to egg on the mob. 

For the target, he or she feels isolated, like they are the only ones going through this. Because their world is so closely tied to what people think about them, when the Internet betrays them and they are exposed and vulnerable, they don't have the wherewithal to handle the abuse. So they internalize it. They can't stop reading what comes next. They might even retaliate with a mean post of their own, but it just elevates the assault. Friends turn judgmental and people believe the lies. Without the mental capacity to bolster their own self-esteem, the target feels lost and may see only one way out: suicide.

The target is not alone, as the lead character Taylor Hillridge (Emily Osment) discovers when she attends a group session, where she meets other cyberbullying victims. They find strength in knowing they have an ally. They also learn how to take back control of their psyche. 

The key tips the movie advises a target of a cyberbully to do are:

1. Print the evidence. Have physical proof of each verbal assault that shows names, times, and platform.
2. Block them. After gathering the evidence, one by one, go through and block every person who has trolled the feed.
3. Tell someone you trust. Whether it's a parent, adult mentor, or teacher -- make sure it is someone who you think will be sympathetic to your predicament and not sit in judgment. 
4. Report them. There may or may not yet be any laws in your jurisdiction, but the only way it can start is if someone tries to file a statement with law enforcement.

Cyberbullying is not the target's fault, no matter what they've done or were perceived to have done. The four points listed above help a target empower himself or herself against their bullies. It's a start, and knowing there is a block and delete key is a powerful ally.

Cyberbully the movie is a good portrayal of how easily the online experience can deteriorate for a teenager, or an adult. It was written by Teena Booth and directed by Charles Binamé. Kay Panabaker, Meaghan Rath, Kelly Rowan, Jon McLaren, and Robert Naylor also star in this film.

Twitter Trolls, Sharp Knives and Labor Laws: Inside the New Kids Reality TV Trend

One concern common among any television show featuring kids, though, is the intense scrutiny faced by anyone in the public eye. When Season 14 of “Project Runway” wrapped its run last month, winner Ashley Nell Tipton immediately received enormous backlash on social media, with users claiming she didn’t deserve the title, only winning because she designed for plus-sized women.

But the spinoff show has taken some measures to protect the kids.

Twitter Trolls, Sharp Knives and Labor Laws: Inside the New Kids Reality TV Trend

You Look Disgusting

 This is a powerful video from +My Pale Skin that reaffirms there is no pleasing anyone. Chew on this for a moment: those who post hateful comments, how is YOUR life so much more perfect than ours? The only person's opinion that matters is your own.

 

Every Cyberbully Target's Fantasy

Unfriended is a movie that was released this week (April 17, 2015) that is penned with a brilliant premise.

While it was created for the horror genre, in reality, it could fall under fantasy, at least in the idea that every cyberbullying target will fantasize about what they might do to their own bully.

The storyline goes like this: girl gets bullied online; girl commits suicide; girl's account comes to life and haunts her bullies online; bullies die off one-by-one. Can it get any better than that?

This is not to advocate taking any action against your bully, but we can all dream.

Happy Slapping: Another Form of Cyberbullying

There is nothing happy about Happy Slapping. The term was coined for when a planned or unplanned assault is videotaped and posted online. Its roots seemingly originate in the United Kingdom.

This presentation provides a quick overview of what this entails.

Happy slapping!!!!!!!! from asmedia

This is a crime. It is also taking the act of physical bullying to the Internet. Whether you live in the United Kingdom or North America, there will be legislation that deals with this.

Another term used for a group of individuals who assault a person or group is called swarming. These incidents could end up online, too.

Of course, just because happy slapping and swarming are a crime, doesn't mean the victims will always receive justice. The laws have much catching up to do in order to reflect societal expectations.

This short film is a clear example of what happy slapping looks like.

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.

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.

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.

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.

181 Charges of Cyberbullying Impacts Businesses Worldwide

“Imagine you’re a small-business owner or any business owner and somebody posts information to your clients that is false.”

A forensic investigation that stemmed from Canada to the United States to the United Kingdom ended in charging an Ottawa man with 181 counts of cyberbullying. The crime spree victimized 38 people over a dozen years. The charges reigned from identity fraud, criminal harassment, defamation libel and each of his attacks were targeted.

For more, read here.