Angrily you ask, "How could they allow this video to be uploaded again?"
You decide to try the usual strategy and tell your child to stay off the Internet. Unfortunately, your child fights you at every turn with his reasoning that he or she is growing up and should be allowed to do things with the permission of a parent. You leave your child alone because at the end of the day, your child does have a point.
One morning you get up and find that your child hasn't come down for breakfast. You go up assuming the child is on the computer up all night from doing YouTube videos after you decided to restore the Internet access. You call the child's name and find that the child doesn't answer.
You open the door and find that your child has hung himself.
I tell this story because this was the end result for Megan Meier, a 13-year-old girl from Dardenne Prairie, Missouri, who killed herself in 2006 after a boy she liked on MySpace left her several negative messages calling her names. The final message allegedly told her to kill herself.
As it turns out, the boy was not even a boy in real life, but a grown adult whose daughter had been fighting with Megan and used the Internet to take revenge against Megan for that.
This could happen to your child.
It is easy for people to dismiss bullies and ignore them. "Words are words" is the common expression as well as, "People will hurt you if you let them". The problem with those statements in regards to Megan is that Meier herself was suffering from depression.
People who suffer from depression generally have trouble engaging in social relationships. Sometimes they barely go outside for fear of being judged by the society at large. Given the way kids and people in general can be cruel to one another, someone who knows someone that has depression could easily use the anonymity of the Internet to make life miserable for that individual, even to the point of death.
I implore the community of YouTube and the folks at Google who run YouTube to seriously create better ways of fighting this kind of thing. The flagging process is simply not enough. People who get their accounts and videos taken down are re-uploading new videos and making new accounts to keep their hate alive without any real consequences from the site itself.
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.