Tag: CYBERBULLYING

A school board member in Pleasant Plains, Arkansas has announced that he will step down from his position, after having faced widespread criticism for a torrent of anti-gay rants he posted on his Facebook page. Clint McCance, who served as the vice president of the Midland School District, recently spewed a slew of homophobic sentiments all over his Facebook page, in response to GLAAD's October ...

An accused cyberbully in Australia will have to stop terrorizing his ex, after receiving a formal court order via a decidedly informal medium: Facebook. In a video sent to the suspect, an officer from the Australian state of Victoria explains what the court's intervention order means, and says that the bully must stop contacting the ex who filed the complaint against him. Police had reportedly ...

The 'Ugly Meter' is supposed to offer iPhone users a new way to joke around with their friends, but many are worried that the new app could provide today's cyberbullies with yet another way to harass their victims. The app, which is available for $0.99 on the iTunes Store, uses facial recognition technology to analyze a person's anatomical symmetry. Once a user submits a photo of someone's ...

In case you didn't see the story of the Detroit-area woman who inexplicably felt the need to taunt a dying 7-year-old girl on Facebook, let us simultaneously ruin and brighten your day. It begins with Jennifer Petkov and her husband Scott, of Trenton, Michigan, who decided to bring a feud with their neighbors to the social networking site. Jennifer targeted the young Kathleen Edward, who is in ...

Are Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei, the two Rutgers University students accused of broadcasting roommate Tyler Clementi shortly before he killed himself, evil people? Kaitlin Sheerin, a junior at the school, recently told NPR, "I would never think of invading my roommate's privacy like that. I think it's sick what they did." But, since the ethical rules of the Internet are still only beginning to be ...

Lately, we've been worried about the mask of anonymity that many Internet users don before they hop onto a comment thread and start spewing vile sentiments at their fellow users. Unlike day-to-day speech, which has its ingrained mores and relative codes of civility, the Internet is a whole new communication mechanism, where you don't need to look someone in the eye as you tell them that future ...

Share Dear Switched commenters: please think twice before verbally bashing someone online! We have to imagine that there are more people out there like 25-year-old Breana Greathouse, who traveled over 200 miles with a gun in her hand to kill someone who was mean to her on the Internet. Breana (which we've also seen spelled "Briana") was apprehended on Wednesday morning in Ottumwa, Iowa after ...

A new California law has worried free speech advocates by criminalizing the practice of impersonating someone else online. SB 1411, introduced to the California legislature in February and recently signed into law by Governor Schwarzenegger, makes it a misdemeanor to impersonate someone without their consent "through or on an Internet Web site or by other electronic means for purposes of harming, ...

Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old Rutgers University freshman, is believed to have jumped off the George Washington Bridge after his roommate and another Rutgers student broadcast a hidden live-stream of Clementi having sex, according to WPIX. Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei, both 18, were charged with invasion of privacy for setting up a webcam to view an encounter between Clementi and another person on ...

Since April of this year, a conservative government official has been anonymously targeting a man he calls a "radical homosexual activist" -- blogging about his activities, disparaging his personal life, staging demonstrations outside of his residence, and naming and criticizing his known cohorts. There's nothing shocking about that, right? What if we were to tell you that the aforementioned ...

He's back. Believe it or not, it's been a full eight years since we last saw Ghyslain Raza -- or, as he's more commonly known, the 'Star Wars Kid.' But now, according to Motherboard, Raza has returned to public life -- although the road back has been far from easy. Shortly after he ascended to the zenith of the Internet on the strength of the lightsaber swordplay video he made as a chubby ...

"Get a yellow nylon rope, about eight feet. That is all you need. And look around your apartment for somewhere to hang from. I can help you with the cam when you need to." That's what William Melchert-Dinkel, a 47-year-old nurse from Faribault, Minnesota, told 18-year-old Nadia Kajouji on March 6, 2008. Kajouji, who had been chatting with Melchert-Dinkel online about her suicidal thoughts, went ...

"There is absolutely no reason for any middle school student to be a part of a social networking site! Let me repeat that - there is absolutely, positively no reason for any middle school student to be a part of a social networking site! None." That's the claim being made by Anthony Orsini, the principal at Benjamin Franklin Middle School in Ridgewood, New Jersey. The school administrator's ...

Highlights from this morning's other big tech headlines.... It's a sad day for satirists, slackers and Internet meme followers. Despite support from the film's director, the classic 'Downfall' Hitler mashups have begun disappearing from YouTube. Constantin Films has apparently decided its 2004 film has received enough free publicity, and is reportedly demanding the removal of the ridiculous ...

Whereas most parental online fears used to revolve around protecting their children from external threats, like online predators, recent years have seen a swell of concern surrounding the behavior of students themselves. In response to parental worries about cyber-bullying and student privacy, several school systems around the country have adopted, or are considering adopting, curriculum ...