Let's imagine for a moment that you have a teenager who has heard about a place called YouTube. All of his friends are on the site blogging on video about their lives and sharing videos and basically having a good time. This same teenager who used to go outside and play along with his friends has now subscribed to them online and is talking to them through his webcam.
You, unaware of your teenager's growing obsession, decide to allow this to pass. Weeks go by, then months. The teenager you once knew holds a sour face at the dinner table and sometimes even appears to be upset when you ask him about school or real-life interests.
Being the concerned parent, you talk to friends about your teenager's changing attitude. They tell you stories about the site known as YouTube. You hear the words "bullying" and "hate comments". They tell you to check your teen's computer and search for clues for such definitions.
Somehow you find a way to get your teenager away for a few hours. You go through his email client program and find several messages from YouTube with the subject field of each with a rather negative and hurtful heading. You click on the link to his inbox on YouTube and find that he is still signed into his account.
What you see is horror beyond belief.
There are dozens and dozens of messages all of which speak ill of your child. Some even suggest that his life isn't worth living and that he should go and kill himself. You manage to find his main channel page and find comments of a similar nature there.
Worse still, you find that these people leaving the comments are the very friends that your child hangs out with.
You decide to be brave, suck in your gut, and watch some of the videos he recorded. The first few start out with everyday things: musical tastes, relationships, and some random videos of your child doing nothing. But the newer videos have a different tone.
The newer videos feature your child in a more depressed state and very sensitive. You notice some of them are linked in response to other videos. A mere click on the original video takes you to a channel of one of the friends your child has that you noticed in one of the nasty emails left in the child's inbox.
Article comments
1 - Matthew T. Sussman
So YouTube needs to change their entire way of handling negative comments because of something that happened on MySpace?
2 - Matthew Milam
The point I was trying to make was that people need to give a damn about cyberbullying -- on Myspace and on YouTube.
But what happened on Myspace could easily and does happen on YouTube?
3 - Matthew T. Sussman
Well, perhaps. But you paint this grandiose theoretical about kids getting comments on their videos that are menacing, and e-mails of the same nature. Then you throw in the real story of an Internet relationship gone awry on MySpace. Your supposition doesn't match reality, at all.
They're completely different things, filed under the general umbrella of "mean people on the Internet" and should be treated as such. As for preventative measures, they should begin with the mother and father. Not the private Web entity.
4 - Matthew Milam
Did you read the article about Megan Meier that I linked to?
5 - Matthew Milam
If read the article, you will see that there are no measures in place to get criminal charges against individuals who target people like Megan
6 - Matthew T. Sussman
No, I didn't read that article, but I read your article, which makes no mention of a call to implement a system criminal penalties. Just the vague concept of "fighting" it. Let's try and keep to one subject at a time here.
Has it ever been a crime for a school bully to make fun of kids in class?
7 - Ianfelter
Matt... you can't rely on anyone to have your back. You're somebody who has to fight is own battles. (Like me.) Stand against the people you're having trouble with, or block/ignore them.
You've got to stop deleting your accounts. You doing that makes you look like a runner. You've as much right to blog on YT as anyone else. That's all I got to say.
8 - Doug Hunter
I hate restrictions on the internet. Why let a 1 in 100,000,000 experience between one bad apple and one mentally disturbed kid destroy the open forum billions of people on the planet?
Here's the answer to your problem?: better parenting (by the parents of course, not the government)
9 - Milla Valkeasuo
Welcome to the internet age where everything is possible.. yes, online bullies suck.
10 - Stephen
I was on Youtube and I got a fair share of abuse as well as a lot of support from other users, but the abuse I got was abuse from, for example, people who hate the Irish, hate users for liking wrestling, and in most cases, Liverpool and Chelsea fans making fun of me because I support Manchester United (such as making fun of the 1958 Munich air disaster), but when my account got suspended for alleged "copyright infringement" i decided not to go back to Youtube and go to Myspace and Dailymotion, especially because these haters on youtube were so determined to get my account deleted, that they filed false copyright infringement notices to Youtube to get my videos taken down when I own them.