What you find is even more horrible than the messages.
You find that this friend, someone who knows every bit of your child's personal life, has decided to put your child on blast, even going so far as to suggest what was suggested in the many emails — that your teenage son needs to end his life to clear the way for those who are more important. You know as a parent that you can call on his parents to stop him from saying such things about your child and to stay away from your child.
But, you also know the child may take this action as a means of being nosy and controlling. Just at that moment you see a flag button which allows you to mark a video inappropriate for the site. You mark the video under the category of "bullying" and do so on other videos that you find that are negative towards your child.
You feel as a parent that YouTube has given you the ability to take control of bullies on the Internet in the same way that you can with bullies who bother your child at school. You come back to your child's computer days later while he is out somewhere and return to his YouTube account. You ignore the messages because your main focus is the video content his so-called friends decided to upload to bring your child down.
You go to the channels to find the videos you flagged and find that rather than being taken down, they have merely been given a warning, one that asks to confirm your birth date. You are perplexed. "Aren't they watching these horrible things?" you think to yourself.
You decide to do it some more to make them pay attention to your problem.
Days pass and you return to the site again to see if the videos are taken down. You find that they are and cheer yourself on for having done some good for your child's mental health. You hope it's not a temporary fix.
You find out later just how wrong you are.
You return to the same computer, the same site with the same account signed in. You go to the same channels that his friends have. You find the videos are still up.
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.