What's The Goal Of Anti-Cyberbullying Moves?
from the treating-the-symptoms dept
The WSJ has a column talking about some changes sites like YouTube and MySpace are making to make it easier to flag abusive content. The sites are reacting to the growing storm about cyberbullying, and are perhaps attempting to head off legislation that could inflict onerous regulations on them. The column focuses on the speed with which sites -- often hampered by sheer volume, as well as the number of unfounded reports -- can react to the flags and take down offending content. But should removing content that depicts or constitutes bullying or harassment be the ultimate goal? Like other reporting systems, it's a little hard to tell if these will actually do anything to get to the root of the problem: the bullying itself. Treating cyberbullying as separate and distinct from bullying or other abusive behavior that happens offline just masks the underlying issue. Without addressing that, the real problems for the victims will continue, regardless of whether their tormentors' activities get displayed online or not.
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Filed Under: bullying, cyberbullying
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What's at work there...
Whatever can be reduced to a sound bite or a slogan (ex: forcing lenders to make bad loans in exchange for the political capital gained by characterizing it as "affordable housing") gets priority in DC, whether it's a "War on Drugs" (often persecuting constituents whose behavior, absent the illegality of drugs, would be otherwise unobjectionable), or paying off Archer Daniels Midland under a big American Gothic print and calling it "saving the family farm", whatever sells the candidate* gets legislated.
Add this to the numerous stupidities done for the purpose, not of "protecting our children", but of SELLING A CANDIDATE AS HAVING MADE AN EFFORT TO "protect our children". Of course, it's unsurprising that such efforts, made for ulterior and selfish motives, never achieve any such thing.
*-that is, "sells to the credulous, the naive, and the uninformed".
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Whining and Dining
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Pass Another Law
If Barack Obama, George Bush, and John McCain can be nice to each other, then why should we lowly citizens be held to any lesser standard?
Forget "Freedom of Speech." Our nation is in crisis. We should declare Martial Law and use the National Guard to enforce the "Be Nice" laws using instant execution if necessary.
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Re: Pass Another Law
Obviously if people are whining, they have some inward or external need/condition they probably need to address before they can be fully content with themselves. Remember that the inward condition drives daily thoughts, and action.
But legislating it or creating an environment where enforced behaviorism is the ideal just makes the enforced non-enforced behavior fester in a way, until..
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butthurt
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What's the goal of anti-cyberbullying moves?
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Ya...
Maybe put the money into more Barney shows. At least those teach us manners and respect.
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I'll bet it's the corporations....
"Let's face it; most of the large corporations are using very aggressive reverse SEO methods to bury the opinion of bloggers and others they fear. Why doesn't congress just let the corporations send squads of goons over to shut down any newspaper that dares to speak the truth? They are doing the same thing online right now, so why aren't they allowed to blockade the delivery gates at publishers and newspapers and be done with it??"
http://blogs.computerworld.com/node/5770
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Grow some.
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www
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