Thoughts on MA tragedy & Facebook Failings & Ideas for Protecting Your Kids

A few people have written tonight about the latest bullying tragedy. So I wanted to share my thoughts on the recent suicide and criminal charges out of Massachusetts for cyberbullying that turned to rape and violence and suicide.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2010/03/holding_for_pho.html

Working in games / entertainment & social media/convergence field I've been dealing with online fans and communities since before the Internet. I am a very strong civil libertarian by nature but balanced by my belief in reasonable laws and limits applied fairly. I'm committed to communities/tribes self organizing and creating their own ground rules as long as they meet the lowest limit set by the law.

The problem of cyberbullying generally speaking is that it is now a stage in the overall bullying process and I've seen the media and our own district personnel miss that fact and only want to say we can't control it / do anything so we must ban access to the digital square.  It is very true that online word spreads at the speed of light and that people can say things they might not say in person if they saw someone's face -- but in reality these kids have already said those exact same things in person or to a friend in the real world specifically at school.  It is only wishful thinking to say that the internet/Facebook is to blame.

Deleting an account of a kid who was targeted can cause significant problems in collecting evidence.  If you need to / want to keep your child from seeing what is being said -- change the password.  Also be careful about un-friend-ing or blocking people on their account as then you may not have easy access to the piece of content in question that needs reported.

Using Facebook to find friends and things in common with people is the future to the "Bowling Alone" problem. As kids move from one school to another or have entirely new schedule/friends every grading period -- access to learn about each other and chat online helps prevent social isolation.  The problem is that it is proven in psychological testing --  the more people you put together in a space the less likely if they see a problem to speak up or help someone in need this is unfortunately true in the real world as well as online.  There are not enough Good Samaritans.

From what I can tell, the bullying starts in school with teasing, unaddressed it becomes intimidation, then hate and callousness this then flows into the community, then online and then back into the schools and the community. Often the kids don't even remember what originally happend to make them dislike the other person as they just keep ticking off more and more things they don't like about the target.  To the point of entirely devaluing them from a human being worth understanding -- into the "other" not worthy to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That "others" mere existence and happiness must be stamped out.

When it gets to that point you can only have SERIOUS intervention before it gets worse.  You also need to create an environment where teachers, parents and police seize upon those "teachable" moments and STOP EVERYTHING so a kid or a group of kids gets the message clearly what happened and how that was handled poorly and they must try and empathize with the target.  Its the "Love your neighbor as yourself" lesson.

I've actually talked to some media outlets on background about the fact that Facebook's reporting process has fallen behind all their other changes so you actually cannot easily report every piece of content and all the different content types or abuse in the apps. Their reporting instructions/systems are therefore out of date. Facebook keeps changing their page layouts and the report abuse system no longer works to report the many different content types. These changes do not allow 3rd parties like parents or schools who see some public piece of content to report it.  Plus after a user blocks an offending user -- they often can't even go back to access the proper spot to report abuse. This lack of simple working functionality for a company valued at $13billion is very bad.

There are some tips for parents and kids that they can do to protect themselves as the abusers often post threats and then delete them before they get into trouble/caught and lie about them. Many bullies had thought they had figured out they could just delete/hide threats and they'd disappear -- making reporting to the police harder as they need probable cause before Facebook would release information.

But if a user has Yahoo / GMail for their email and leaves the default "send an email notification" setting with Facebook then even if they delete that email from their inbox, it remains in their online trash and that will keep all the history of direct threats, inbox messages, wall posts, etc. with a trackable message id until a user dumps their trash manually. Anyone who posts a comment inside a thread and who has notifications turned on then gets further comments emailed to them so that content spiders out as well and multiple copies may exist in inboxes or trash cans.  All of this can then be used by the police in their supoena power to get the actual records of a users recent account activity.

Additionally, parents/kids can use the prints screen key and the "paint" program that comes in Microsoft Windows to capture shots and then cut and paste the other text from all the string of comments. That too can be provided to the police to meet the probable cause standard for them to get access to an accounts activity.  Mac users I am sure you can use the print option and then "Save as PDF" inside the Send to Printer Menu that pops up.  Know in both cases you may not capture all the information -- just the starting message/status update.  You should cut and paste all the relevant text into a document and then marry that to the graphic screenshot.