http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2287328/Justin-Bieber-Schoolgirl-15-sent-death-threats-jealous-fans-star-retweets-review.html
Today I found an article on the DailyMail which reflects the enormity of cyber-bulliyng. Fifiteen year old school girl Courtney Barrasford posted on Twitter a positive review of Justin Biebers latest album. 'Not usually a fan of Justin Bieber, but his acoustic album is really good!'. This lead to the singer retweeted her post, meaning that his 35 million followers could see it too. As a result of this Courtney ended up receiving tonnes of abusive messages, many of them were even death threats.
A 12 year old posted "Just tell her to die and leave Justin alone".
This article highlights how out of control cyber-bullying has become, Courtney posted a nice tweet on Twitter which resulted in hate mail from all over the globe and from complete strangers. It is also scary to see how young some of these teenagers are who are happily posting such nasty messages. This news article reflects the issues I cover within When The Virtual Becomes Real, the blur between the real world and these online communities. these youngsters would be a lot less likely to say such things to someone face to face, let alone a stranger.
The girls mother demands that there should be tighter monitoring on the content that is posted on these social networking sites. However due to the volumn and range of use, it is impossible to attempt to control which is what makes the sites a perfect tool for bullying. Content can be removed once it has been flagged up as inappropriate but by then the damage is usually done as the content has been seen by those intended to.
The severity of the situation escalated when some of the bitter fans circulated rumours that Courtney was dating Justin and that she was also pregnant with his baby. This shows how easy it is for anything to become viral on the internet and how quick other fans were to join in and spread the gossip further. This is one of the problems with cyber-bullying, the platform provides the ability for anyone to easily join in with their own taunts. It also shows how a post can be seen by so many and spread even further. Humiliation can be caused on such an extreme scale.
Cyber-bullying is something that really needs addressing as the fans do not realise the severity and impact their actions can cause. By abusing someone through the use on an online social network is a cowardly form of bullying but it also de-humanizes the action as it is simply typing words through a keyboard. The virtual world is seen to be completely distant than these fans real life.
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