Ask.fm Says Most Messages Came From Troubled Teen's Own IP Address While New Cyberbullying Law Is Widely Panned
from the a-problematic-issue-addressed-with-progressively-worse-ideas dept
The recent suicides of two teenagers, Hannah Smith and Retaeh Parsons, have prompted officials to take actions to crack down on cyberbullying. Smith committed suicide after extensive bullying on ask.fm, a social Q&A site that skews heavily towards teen users. Parsons' case is a little more troubling, as it involves an alleged rape and the extensive circulation of pictures of the attack.
UK Prime Minister David Cameron responded to Smith's suicide by calling for a boycott of "vile site" ask.fm, making the same convenient mistake many politicians do -- blaming a website for the actions of a small percentage of users. Fortunately, Cameron didn't call for any further legislation, pointing out that laws dealing with harassment (online and offline) are already on the books in the UK.
Ask.fm responded by stating it would hire more moderators and make more of an effort to track and prevent abuse. It also opened an investigation into the activity on Smith's account and returned with some very interesting findings. According to its investigation, 98% of the messages "aimed" at Hannah Smith's account came from her own IP address. Smith's father has, quite reasonably, asked the site owners to substantiate this claim. He's also asked why they haven't come forward with information on the other 2%.
While ask.fm's claim about where the abusive messages originated seems bizarre, it's not an impossibility.
Scott Freeman, founder of The Cybersmile Foundation, said: "It's very easy to get carried away in this circle of online self-abuse when you're alone in your room. [Children] check it, and keep checking, and it evolves into a kind of self-harm.And what happens if the prompts are ignored, or the abusive answers are simply not coming fast enough? Or, as Hazel Robinson theorizes over at the New Statesman, what if the site becomes a vehicle to express self-hatred?
"We've seen instances where people have actually lined themselves up for abuse, posting a question like "do you think I'm pretty?" knowing that they'll get torn apart. What we're dealing with now is a completely new concept. It's the hate that's resonating through all of our social media coming through to our youth."
You see, I can think of maybe four or five young people I've encountered on Tumblr who I would (non-judgementally, analytically) suspect have sent themselves anonymous abuse messages in order to express their self-hatred, attack themselves through the abstraction of answering anonymous aggression. It's easy to do – just have an additional browser where you're not signed in to Tumblr and leave your inbox open to anonymous things. Cleaner than a razorblade, its simple to express your self-loathing through an avatar of external hatred.This isn't to say that Hannah Smith attacked herself, and absent any evidence from ask.fm, there's no reason to believe she did. But the possibility remains, and it's probably not as unlikely as we parents might hope.
Parson's death, on the other hand, has prompted a huge overreaction by Nova Scotia's government, which rushed through a very terrible piece of cyerbullying legislation.The new law puts the power completely in the hands of the accuser, removes any sort of objective standard and levies harsh penalties against the accused without allowing them to defend themselves at any point.
Once again, a tragedy has resulted in legislation that makes things worse for internet users in Nova Scotia (the bill does not address regular bullying), while ignoring the laws already in place to deal with the incident that began the entire cycle.
Fortunately, the reaction to the new law has been overwhelmingly negative. Putting aside the fact that legislators often enjoy a good coattail ride, the responses from elsewhere in Canada seem to indicate no one's interested in subjecting themselves to this legislative disaster.
A National Post editorial points out just how much harm this law is capable of doing.
One might hope that the law will only be used in serious cases, but that's hardly to its credit: Legislators shouldn't be writing laws they don't want enforced. We are talking about fundamental rights and freedoms: Taking away someone's phone or banning him from the Internet represents a serious impediment to education and employment. Access to a lengthy and costly appeals process is a woefully inadequate safeguard against abuses.The Toronto Star's editorial isn't much kinder.
Well-intentioned though it is, it unwisely defines cyberbullying in overly broad terms as “any electronic communication . . . that is intended or ought reasonably be expected to cause fear, intimidation, humiliation, distress or other damage or harm to another person's health, emotional well-being, self-esteem or reputation.” The Star gets letters to the editor every day whose very point is to cause humiliation and distress to people with whom the writers disagree, if not to undermine their self-esteem and reputation. Are all of these people cyberbullies? There's something called free speech in this country. The new law crowds it.Nova Scotia's law is so unpopular finding positive editorials is nearly impossible. National Post columnist Chris Selley expresses as much towards the end of a recent article:
And Sun Media's Anthony Furey joins a growing consensus of reasonable commentators in deploring Nova Scotia's absurd new anti-cyber-bullying law. (If anyone's seen a column or editorial supporting it, we'd love a heads up.)Well, here's one.
The "Editorial Staff" at the Moose Jaw Times Herald has offered its support of Nova Scotia's law in one of the weakest editorials I've ever read. Fortunately, it's also very short. The editorial doesn't address any of the issues inherent with the bill, spending most of its time telling us how tragic suicide is and that bullying, especially cyberbullying, is bad and needs to stop.
When it's done spoon-feeding readers the obvious, it wraps up its non-argument with this.
It's time the governments of Canada go to bat for their youth, and place legal barriers into the mix, as [Wayne] MacKay suggests. Such legislation could help prevent further suicides in the same ilk as Parsons, Todd, and Hubley.The Wayne MacKay quoted here is a law professor at Dalhousie University and is heading up a push for this legislation to be enacted across Canada. One would think a law professor would know the difference between good laws and bad laws and not actively pursue enacting such a problematic piece of legislation. (Then again, we have a president with a background in constitutional law, and that clearly hasn't resulted in constitutional rights being protected.)
The op-ed is finally put out of its misery by the final sentence, an insipid cluster of words that can barely muster the enthusiasm to get to the ending punctuation.
It certainly couldn't hurt.Yeah, actually it could. For several examples, see nearly every other editorial written about the new cyberbullying bill. Anything recommended by the half-hearted phrase "It certainly couldn't hurt" is something obviously devoid of positive attributes. When you have to resort to using negative statements in order to "praise" something, it's time to reconsider your support.
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Filed Under: cyberbullying, hannah smith, retaeh parsons, suicide
Companies: ask.fm
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And the solution is/was for sites to do some moderating.
A big problem with internet forums is that owners are solely intent on monetary gain without recognizing civil responsibilities in a complex society; they write TOS pages saying exactly that they'll monetize users any way can but users have no rights or recourse whatsoever. -- But that's balloney! It's just not the way civil society works, and that's why/symptom of it falling apart.
Needs be made explicit in law that an internet forum is very little different in its rules from a bulletin board in what can be posted, nor much different from most social settings in other aspects. -- That means explicitly that the proposed law goes way too far, -- Definitely "on teh internets" must not give corporations getting money from those forums ANY special immunity.
Law is too important to be left to politicians. -- That's why civil enforcement in terms of owners moderating forums must be done, so that politicians have no excuse for their tyranny. -- OH, and you kids have a certain duty to limit your own excesses TOO.
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Re: And the solution is/was for sites to do some moderating.
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Re: And the solution is/was for sites to do some moderating.
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Re: Re: And the solution is/was for sites to do some moderating.
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Re: Re: Re: And the solution is/was for sites to do some moderating.
Lots of animals drink alcohol.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: And the solution is/was for sites to do some moderating.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: And the solution is/was for sites to do some moderating.
Wild animals eat fruit that has fermented and contains alcohol. Whether they're just trying to eat fruit or they enjoy the alcohol I have no idea.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: And the solution is/was for sites to do some moderating.
Your argument is basically that you don't like the way I worded my sentence. Grammar Nazi arguments aside my argument stands.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: And the solution is/was for sites to do some moderating.
I don't see animals jumping off cliffs very often (though I've heard of stories of animals that are practically tortured or at least given a very miserable life, by humans, committing suicide. Heck I had a friend that had a cat that seemed to be sick, after eating a pigeon (not sure if that's what caused the alleged sickness), trying to sit directly behind a parked car tire several times as if wanting the car to kill it upon backing out of the driveway). If a cat accidentally falls out a tree that's technically self destructive behavior. but that's not what I'm referring to, such a reference would be ridiculous and I shouldn't have to be that specific to thwart off grammar Nazis.
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They absolutely do get drunk. Obviously they don't know if it's bad for them. I don't know if they even realize it's not just normal fruit.
Your argument is basically that you don't like the way I worded my sentence.
I wasn't making an argument, I was just stating a fact you were apparently not aware of. However, I think your argument, that humans are "dumber" than wild animals, is not supported by the fact that humans engage in self destructive behavior more frequently than animals. The fact that a behavior is self destructive does not imply that it does not require intelligence to carry it out.
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Re: Re: Re: And the solution is/was for sites to do some moderating.
But in nature those are the ones that don't make it and don't procreate so although it happens they become less frequent in numbers as they succumb by themselves and can't pass that behavior ahead.
But for humans we don't have that, all those natural selection tools are abhorrent to our sense of survival, so how do we prevent that kind of outcome without natural tools? or should we prevent it at all?
hard questions to be answered and I don't have good answers for them.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: And the solution is/was for sites to do some moderating.
Indeed, the key word here is 'wild' animals. Beer does not exist outside of humans creating it.
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Re: And the solution is/was for sites to do some moderating.
But parents seem still intent on dodging all responsibility.
FYFY
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Re: And the solution is/was for sites to do some moderating.
http://torziruk.wordpress.com/
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Self-cyberbullying is a form of self-harm
Which suggests to me mental health professionals ought to consider teen self-bullying as something akin to cutting or similar self-harm.
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Re: Self-cyberbullying is a form of self-harm
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Re: Re: Self-cyberbullying is a form of self-harm
One hopes that is not what ask.fm means by "her own IP address". That would be near NSA-level doublespeak. Unless they're pretty much making stuff up (which is possible) that should mean an IP address connected to her home ISP account. Of course, the linked article doesn't even use the phrase "IP address" so who knows?
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Re: Re: Self-cyberbullying is a form of self-harm
Now that would be sad, because it meant all of her neighbors where doing the bullying.
Her own community was abusing her.
That is the danger of communities, maybe that is how ootb's and AJ's are born.
Or even more sad is the thought that her familiars where the ones doing the abuse to toughen her up, or maybe she did it to herself for some reason.
And of course she will not be the last soon others will follow believing that this is the way to go, maybe societies response to such things may be a catalyst to more of it happening.
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Sorry that is not how cable nodes work.
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will say it again...
Ideas should not be as important than the entity saying them.
What if an Idea was widely accepted even tho the rulers oppose it?
Can't have that now, can we.
Only the powerful and "influential" have good ideas because they said them, and the "influence" or "media" validates their ideas as legit and of course, the best. That status quo must be maintained.
For too long have ideas been allowed to form and grow without any person to blame or discredit. The internet is the breeding ground.
If no one is anonymous then ideas can be discredited because of WHO created them.
The status quo will be maintained.
Who am I ?
I am nothing more than a voice.
If Obama replied to this comment anonymously then his ideas would be equal to mine.
That's what makes anonymity so threatening to the established powers. Can't have us all being of equal stature now, can we.
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Re: will say it again...
But there was much ado made about trying to kill the messenger to stop the message or distract from it, but you can carry the message forward.
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The internet is full of strangers, and most of them aren't warm and fuzzy on the inside.
I feel sorry for all these warm and bubbly people who log onto the internet, expecting to share the love with strangers.
Best piece of advice for these misguided individuals, is to log back off the internet as soon as your feelings start to get hurt.
Second best piece of advice is to stay anonymous. That way you're posts can't be 'made fun of' offline in school.
I have great respect for people who post using their real names online. I don't think I could deal with the insults being thrown at me, without getting my feelings hurt or becoming angry.
Hence, I probably don't have a thick enough skin to deal with it, so I just stay an anonymous coward. :)
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Wait
So now IP address is absolute proof of something? You don't think that his bully friends could have either spoofed the IP or had a rootkit or similar on the kids computer to send their hateful messages from there?
Come on guys... if you are going to argue that IP address doesn't mean anything in copyright cases, you need to stay on the same side of the argument the rest of the time too.
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Because... no disrespect to the dead- whom can't defend themselves- ever intented, your daughter was playing for attention.
When your daughter goes on a website and bashes herself with sockpuppet accounts, she has some severe mental health concerns. Why didn't he, as her father, come forward with information on THAT?
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So dumb
The stupid... it burns!
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So, are we really ready to throw privacy, freedom of speech under the bus and stupid teenagers in jail just because of some broad term that really has its origin in teen stupidity? Why not do the most basic investigative job (you know, teens are stupid, they usually won't cover their tracks even if they know how) and give the bully a good, hard wrist slap (and possibly deprive him of his gaming) and offer support to the bullied instead?
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Kids
- self hatred
- revenge
- brainwashing
See, that was not difficult at all.
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Turn it off
Maybe teach your kids to defend themselves, and monitor their use, it's easy coz the services aren't in the kids names so if you want to see activity and what not call ur provider and check. Step up and parent ur kids, I would rather my kid hate me for disconnecting the Internet and phones then be dead or in a mental hospital. Parents need to do their job and be parents.
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