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Cyber wars...abusive cyber bullies beware!!!
- Thread starter ilovesingapore
- Start date
Fuck you go suck bananas. Haha hahaha. .
The only war we should be fighting is against govt agents and shills spreading FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) in cyberspace.
Pinky wanted to co-opt and control the Internet and social media. When that failed, now he attempts to demonize it.
What a petty little pussy he is. He's really a chip off the old block.
Pinky wanted to co-opt and control the Internet and social media. When that failed, now he attempts to demonize it.
What a petty little pussy he is. He's really a chip off the old block.
there are people who committed suicide because of cyber harassment
there are people who became insane and mentally traumatised for life...
the casualties are there...not seen and many not reported.....cyber bulling is a new disease inflicting many , even in this forum....
Totally agree....in the same vein, we should also be fighting trolls, disruptive and destructive elements who spread lies, misinformations and untruths about government ...and of course, we should take to task cyber bulliles, hooligans and thugs who intimidate and threaten forummers...
scroobal disappeared around the time nicole seah was depressed.... coincidence?
Singapore has the second highest number of cyber-bullying cases after the US, says new survey. STEPHANIE GWEE reports
FOR most primary school pupils, going to school meant having fun with their friends and mugging for exams.
But for one Primary 3 pupil of an all-girls school in the East, school was living hell.
The quiet, bespectacled girl was repeatedly called 'ugly' and 'irritating' by her peers. Not only was she insulted in school, but these comments also made their way to online blogs.
After enduring the insults for more than six months, she wished that she could die.
Her mother, a housewife in her early 40s, found out about her daughter's trauma after she noticed her feigning sickness just to cut class.
The girl is now undergoing school counselling.
It is cases like this that makes Sarah Tan-Leong an unlikely cyber vigilante. This was, after all, a woman who taught her kids how to log onto the Net to do research when they were barely six years old.
But after hearing stories about the prevalence of cyber-bullying, the 42-year-old accountant is making an extra effort to educate her 14-year-old twins on the ills of the Internet.
Now, not only does she limit the time her daughters surf the Net to just two hours every day, but she also frequently reminds them to report any cases of cyber-bullying if they chance upon any offending materials on the Net.
Sarah’s concern is not unfounded.
In an informal poll conducted by Touch Cyber Wellness & Sports of 255 students from three secondary schools, almost 35 per cent said they had been cyber-bullied in one form or another. ..........
Not too long ago, an article by a Kent Ridge Common (KRC) writer, Koh Choon Hwee, touched on the topic of Cyberbullying in NUS, which prompted a reply by Augustin Chiam at studentry.sg, a website that is run by The Ridge team, the publication arm of the National University of Singapore Students’ Union.
In her original article, Koh highlighted the plight of a student, Keira Chen, in the University Scholars Programme of the National University of Singapore (NUS). Keira, who came from a family of low socioeconomic status in Singapore, had written articles on the KRC to raise awareness and highlight the difficulties students with financially disadvantaged backgrounds faced. She also called for a more robust financial aids scheme. Keira’s parents earn less than S$2,000 a month and she supplemented the family household income by giving tuition twice a week as well as holding a part-time job in NUS.
As a result of the published articles, Keira received what Koh described as “unexpected backlash” with students launching personal attacks on the former, and to a lesser extent, the latter. Koh went on to highlight evidences of such attacks with screenshots of comments of a Facebook page that is open only to students and alumni of the University Scholars Programme (USP).
In one instance, one student ‘attacked’ Keira in Koh’s words, by commenting that “[t]his poor girl isn’t the brightest crayon in the box”. Another student was more blunt in his assessment. “YOU ARE VEH STUPID AND YOU SEEM SO PROUD OF IT”. To further rub salt in Keira’s wounds, the same student made an analogous comparison of the fact that Keira needed to read her notes three times before appreciating the underlying meaning with a Japanese anime character, Naruto. Koh also highlighted the fact that such comments generated Facebook “Likes”, which in her words, was a normalisation of “hateful” and “hurtful” behaviour.
Other comments were aimed at the quality of KRC’s journalism. One wrote,”Choon Hwee’s article was appalling: it was so maudlin as to be ineffective”. Another student encouraged his peers to focus on KRC’s “journalistic practice” instead.
Koh went on highlight that what she put up on KRC was a small sample of comments that were aimed at Keira, and she had excluded others as they were “painful” to her. Koh elaborated,“our whole learning and living environment suddenly turned hostile; Keira was very affected as she bore the brunt of the personal attacks and I was very worried for her.”
Koh’s article on cyberbullying prompted a rebuttal from Augustin Chiam, another USP student, who pointed out that such comments are made by only a small number of USP students. This is not to say that the small handful of culprits are right either. They should be reflecting on their purpose of enrolling in the USP. The programme has a vision – “To be an open and dynamic learning community, in which students become self-motivated, independent, informed, thoughtful, and socially responsive”. If those students have not mastered an iota of thoughtfulness or social responsiveness (in a positive way) especially to their brethren of a lower socioeconomic status, then they should be questioning their place in USP, especially when their behaviours do not fit in with the programme’s vision.
The interesting question though, is what constitutes cyberbullying, or what is the definition of cyberbullying? More specifically, what should be the threshold that must be reached or crossed, before it is considered cyberbullying?
When the Institute of Policy Studies sent out invites for a discussion involving an online Code of Conduct which the Singapore government has called on prominent members of the Blogosphere (for the sake of disclosure, New Asia Republic was invited for this discussion, but declined) to establish, the two topics that came up in our internal discussions of cyberbullying were lynching (in multiple numbers) and witch-hunting. Lynching, we defined it as a coordinated attempt to recruit numbers to attack a single victim online. This is different from multiple persona voicing their negative opinions online all at once; there is no coordination in this, as it is likely to be a response to a development or an issue involving the victim or target. However, it is considered lynching when I try to enlist my buddies to attack this person or target. Witch-hunting, we felt is when a person makes public about the address or personal details of the target, which makes him vulnerable to harassment in real life. It could range from making the victims phone number, home address, work place address, etc, public and encourage others to or personally threaten/stalk the person in real life.
For further discussion, let’s move away from the KRC issue and analyse another one – the exchange between Cheo Ming Shen and Rockson Tan. Rockson is a blogger, while Cheo is one of the co-founders of Nuffnang.com, an online advertising company for blogs in Singapore and Malaysia. Cheo is also the Young People’s Action Party chairman for Toa Payoh East. In the exchange between the two, both are in the wrong as it started off with Rockson labelling Cheo a “chee bye kia” (expletive for “vagina kid”). Cheo (as bossming) retaliated with insults of his own, and it continued till this point, when he made the following twitter posts:
bossming: @rocksontan a little birdy told me you live in bukit batok. since you don’t want to meet me online, I will wait everyday at 5pm with a rose
bossming: @rocksontan at the mrt station. Drop your moniker boy. It brings you more trouble than you know.
If we apply the definition of lynching and witch-hunting, Cheo arguably came close to witch hunting or may have just witch-hunted Rockson. By pointing out Rockson’s physical address as somewhere in Bukit Batok and telling the latter he will wait at the MRT everyday at 5 pm is suggestive of stalking, or threats to stalk the target.
Let’s move on to another example, albeit a campus-relevant and social media-related (tweeter and Facebook) one, New Jersey VS Dharun Ravi. The New Yorker published a report on the saga. Dharun Ravi and Tyler Clementi were both students at Rutgers University, USA. Tyler Clementi, a gay student, and Dharun were first year students and room-mates in a dormitory. Tyler began a relationship with another man, M.B. , and invited the latter to his dormitory for intimate sessions. The thing was that Dharun had tweaked the online video chat function of his laptop’s iChat programme to automatically accept incoming calls. This means that Dharun could surreptiously connect to his laptop using a friend’s computer with the iChat programme, and view whatever details that was caught on the video camera.
When Tyler invited M.B. for intimate sessions, he would request private use of the room, i.e. ask Dharun if he could come back to the room later on after the session. The first time when Dharun, and another friend, Molly Wei, caught the proceedings on the former’s laptop, they saw Tyler and M.B. kissing each other. Dharun who initially resisted tweeting about his experience eventually tweeted about it:
“Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly’s room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.”
What Dharun did not realise was that Tyler was aware of his Yay! tweet, and knew about the capturing of his actions on the video camera. During his initial session with M.B., he noticed the green light of Dharun’s video camera was turned on. Dharun’s tweet confirmed his suspicion.
However, he again invited M.B. for another session, and requested the use of the room. This time, Dharun tried to set up a “viewing session” of some sort. He tweeted:
“Anyone with iChat, I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes, it’s happening again.”
However, Tyler who was aware of Dharun’s intentions turned off and shut down Dharun’s laptop, and switched off the power strip. During the aftermath of the incident, Tyler unexpectedly took his own life by jumping off the George Washington bridge. He even updated his suicidal intentions on Facebook:”Jumping off the gw bridge sorry.”
In the same New Yorker article, there was a standard definition of bullying by psychologist Dan Olweus – A person is bullied when he or she is exposed, repeatedly and over time, to negative actions on the part of one or more other persons, and he or she has difficulty defending himself or herself.
And if we consider elements of the New Jersey VS Dharun Ravi case, was Dharun’s actions considered witch-hunting? Arguably yes, he wanted to make Tyler’s intimate moments public by filming them surreptiously. What was Dharun’s purpose in that? A thrill? It is interesting to note that on the night of the same day that Tyler took his own life, Dharun went to delete his “Yay!” tweet and replaced the tweet about the “viewing session” with “Roommate asked for room again. Its happening again. People with ichat don’t you dare video chat me from 930 to 12.”
Hence, if we were to re-visit Koh’s allegation of “cyberbullying”, we now have an idea of what cyberbullying is all about, we have a basis to work on and to determine what constitutes “cyberbullying”. Hence, the relevant questions are, 1) have the perpetrators involved in the attacks against Keira and Koh coordinated their peers to attack both of them (lynching)? 2) Was there any point when a perpetrator released a private detail of either that compromised their privacy and made them vulnerable to harassment? 3) Were the actions of the perpetrators, which resulted in the exposure, criticism, taunting, of the two done repeatedly and over time? We do not know the answer as Koh has elected to censor certain Facebook comments.
If we elect to analyse the remarks that Koh chose to expose in the article – the question is whether they were aimed at Keira intentionally or were mere callous remarks made by those callous few. We tend to go with the latter point; while, the USP envisions itself as an incubator of thoughtful and socially responsive individuals, the reality is that all organisations, including the USP, have their fair share of douchebags, the callous get-out-of-my-elite-uncaring-face types. Questions should also be asked of Koh and Keira, particularly of their threshold levels to tolerate negative reactions both online and in the real world.
In addition, it is also possible that Koh could have conflated the online reactions with another issue, that of taking on an organisation, and in this case, the USP. Editorially speaking, this is a challenge, especially when it comes to publication of a material that can be construed by an organisation as being critical of its functions and its policies. We do not wish to speculate on KRC’s policy on the publication of such materials, but assuming if we were in KRC’s shoes and a person like Keira comes along with an article addressing some of the deficiencies in the processes and functions of an organisation (in this case, it is about financial aid), we will immediately brief the writer of a possible backlash.
The reality is that taking on an organisation will and do result in a backlash in most cases. Critics, and to a large extent, whistleblowers, will be at the receiving end. There will always be those who are part of or support the organisation who do not take kindly to criticisms or whistleblowing. This is why some countries have laws enacted to protect whistleblowers such as the Whistleblowers Protection Act in US, and similarly there are laws in various Australian states to protect them. However, even with the presence of such laws, whistleblowers aren’t spared from the full brunt of a backlash. What more can we say of Singapore where such laws do not exist? It is inevitable that critics and whistleblowers alike proceed on the road ahead riddled with perils.
The second, and arguably the most important editorial consideration is whether the writer or critic is prepared to face the backlash. The reality is that not everyone can survive (literally, yes) the onslaught of negative publicity or public scrutiny, the consequences can be varied from being upset for a while to taking of one’s life as a consequence of cyberbullying. In truth, only a resilient individual who uses his real name to critique or whistleblow, will end up not being adversely affected by the negative backlash.
If we determine that the individual is not resilient enough, and is still keen to publish the critique, we will anonymise his or her details.
The last consideration is the welfare of the writer. If at any point the writer or critic exhibits signs of distress, it could be caused by major conditions such as depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, physical injuries, etc, you have to assume the worst – in such cases, seeing the college or programme counsellors is of not much use, a visit to the local General Practitioner or Family doctor is a more appropriate thing to do. We do not want the victim to progress to the state he or she attempts to take his life.
By now, it is very obvious that being a writer, editor or a citizen journalist is not an activity that we can exactly call a bed of roses. This is not an activity that is palatable to every one. If an individual has low threshold of tolerance for negative feedbacks from readers or other forms of backlash, then they are better off not venturing into such an area. Not every one has the threshold of tolerance to survive well and flourish in such an arena. Although this digital age has lowered barriers with technologies that allow easy publication of works, not everyone has what it takes to survive. We are sure the writers here at the New Asia Republic would have given a serious think about the consequences of making public our written works before taking the plunge. Hopefully, Koh and Keira would have given this a serious thought too.
There are multiple quotes that one can derive inspiration from, one of the favourites is Pritam Singh’s “if you stay in a glass house, don’t throw stones” during a Workers’ Party rally, or another one that is more relevant especially for those are likely to suffer backlash from criticising an organisation – “grow a thick skin and be prepared to take the heat”. They all mean the same thing – don’t write or criticise if you cannot bear the possible consequences, or be prepared to take the heat if you start a fire.
Internet bullies have been around since the days of BBS, dialup internet and the first IRC chatrooms.
The govt is using cyberbullying as a pretext, an excuse to further clamp down on dissent. It's quite telling with all the talk about using your real name on REACH, requiring Yahoo SG to register, suing cartoonists and bloggers etc. Expect an escalation of repressive measures as we approach 2016.
After all, no one wants to be the next George Yeo.
The govt is using cyberbullying as a pretext, an excuse to further clamp down on dissent. It's quite telling with all the talk about using your real name on REACH, requiring Yahoo SG to register, suing cartoonists and bloggers etc. Expect an escalation of repressive measures as we approach 2016.
After all, no one wants to be the next George Yeo.
Poorfuck resorting to cyber blackmailing. Multi millionaire my kar chng:oIo:
Grow a thick skin, grow some hide, grow some spine
and grow some courage and grow some guts TO HIT BACK .....AND HIT HARD AND HARDER.....
and grow some courage and grow some guts TO HIT BACK .....AND HIT HARD AND HARDER.....
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A 12-year-old Florida girl who suffered months of ruthless cyberbullying from other girls committed suicide this week, authorities say.
Rebecca Ann Sedwick of the town of Lakeland in central Florida jumped from a platform at an abandoned cement plant near her home on Monday, according to the Polk County sheriff's office.
Her death is the latest in an apparently growing phenomenon of youths driven to taking their own lives after suffering cruel treatment online via text and photo messaging applications.
More than a dozen girls have been identified as possibly involved in the bullying of Sedwick, Polk County sheriff Grady Judd said at a news conference Thursday.
Rebecca Ann Sedwick of the town of Lakeland in central Florida jumped from a platform at an abandoned cement plant near her home on Monday, according to the Polk County sheriff's office.
Her death is the latest in an apparently growing phenomenon of youths driven to taking their own lives after suffering cruel treatment online via text and photo messaging applications.
More than a dozen girls have been identified as possibly involved in the bullying of Sedwick, Polk County sheriff Grady Judd said at a news conference Thursday.
inform all here when you jumped, most here will cheer for you.
If anyone bullies you just let me know. I'll fix it for a small sum of USD4.95 per month.
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