Shows how much society cares about anyone that's not popular. There are many people who are suicidal - no named hanging out on mstdn or other internet holes. There are many who get bullied everyday in real life and it's worse because you don't have a block button. Why is everyone so focused on cyberbullying these days? They couldn't solve bullying in school. Only made it worse by putting responsibility on management.
I wonder what legal changes they would come up. I am not optimistic.
It is true that celebrities suffering brings attention and can be the catalyst for change.
Bullying has always been a problem. Sometimes its physical, but its always mental. The child who is ostracized is bullied too.
Now, in the virtual world, children find it follows them home too. Even if a child is offline after school, they hear all about what was said about them when they get back to school in the morning.
Where I live, there are good speakers who pass through all the schools, talking separately to the children and to the parents. Their descriptions and explanations made me realise that my mental model of what bullying is or how it works was inaccurate.
But censoring won't stop the bullying in any case. Neither will throwing responsibility around. We have tried both approach. Everytime, something ridiculous come up. All the good guys will go away while the ones willing to bend the law or spirit will stay. They will stay despite being in the grey or illegal because they accumulate enough funds or traction to do so.
Enforcement doesn't happen linearly. And if you stop the bullies from letting others discover them at all, there's no hope to changing them. They will still be able to bully someone but it won't be a celebrity, I guess because they are public.
Society censors majority of suicides. Normal social status doesn't come with followings that will eventually figure out the person died of suicide.
People say the censoring is to keep others from committing suicide. I think it's simply wrong to censor a person that died from taking their own life. Outrage would be more prevalent if things weren't censored like today. I can rightfully assume not all family members are even informed how someone died in a suicide and contrary if someone in the family is lost to cancer or any other illness that results in death. It's easy to realize why certain illnesses get more funding. More people are aware of it.
A lot of positives could come from everyone understanding not all people enjoy living because of whatever reason they suffer that leads to suicide. Progress comes with understanding. I don't think the mental health field is doing a good job at innovating like we see in the tech industry every few years.
If you don't put responsibility for bullying on management, who do you put it on?
IME, bullying was protected by the school because the rule was always "Anyone involved in a fight is punished, even if they didn't start it."
That meant that if someone hit you, you got punished for it. So you couldn't report it or you'd be punished, which basically meant that the majority of conflicts went unreported.
Nobody was holding the school responsible for it, and so they did nothing because it was easiest for them.
However, unlike in-person bullying, cyberbullying is always recorded. (Well, unless you're on voice chat or snapchat or something, I guess.) There's a paper trail for people to follow and determine what really happened.
Perhaps ultimately it shouldn't be the website that's responsible for that, but I know if I were running the website I'd feel ethically that I had to do something.
> I wonder what legal changes they would come up. I am not optimistic.
This. The sad reality, IMO, is that government policing of cyberbullying is never going to work out in practice due to its sheer scale. On the other hand, any legal framework that's going to be introduced would likely be abused by bad actors to suppress speech. So it's either going to be pointless at best, and outright harmful otherwise.
I wonder what legal changes they would come up. I am not optimistic.