Bullies going online with Facebook posts
August 22, 2011 by admin
Filed under Lingerie Events
Facebook has become a breeding ground for nasty comments and embarrassing stories for kids to post about each other, according to five female Great Valley High School students.
Students comment on pictures, calling a person names, or make comments and accusations on someone’s Facebook page that are sexual in nature, said the girls, who asked to remain anonymous. They said there are fights on Facebook where students will bring up an embarrassing event at school, accuse someone of having a sexually transmitted disease or begin a rumor that two students had sex, the girls said.
“Nothing’s ever a secret,” one girl said during an interview at the Exton Square Mall.
The girls’ stories show how Facebook has become a primary tool for cyberbullies. With more than 750 million users, according to Facebook itself, it is the most popular social networking website in the world.
On a local level, bullying reported at West Chester Henderson High School has consistently risen in the last two to three years because of Facebook, according to Koreem Bell, a guidance counselor at the school.
“We can curb bullying during the school day, but students are sharing information at night (with Facebook),” Bell said in a recent interview.
Kathleen Conn, a professor at Neumann University and an expert on cyberbullying, said students spend an average of 7.5 hours per day using electronic devices and of that, two hours is spent on social networking sites.
According to Delaware County Assistant District Attorney Joseph Lesniak, the average teen has 100 friends on Facebook. He considers any harassing comments made on the site to be cyberbullying, because multiple people can read it.
While Facebook can create the kind of rumor spreading and arguments that the five Great Valley students described, that information can also move from the Internet to the real world and lead to more traditional forms of bullying.
Conn said when she was a principal at an elementary school in the West Chester Area School District, she had a fifth-grade student who had a Facebook page. The girl had arranged a fight through Facebook, so Conn brought her in the office and asked her to pull up her page. While the original fight never occurred, Conn found video of a fight between another student and a student teacher at different elementary school in the district.
“The child had no idea (what she was doing),” Conn said.
Facebook is well aware of the problem of the cyberbullying that occurs on its site and has made some changes to help prevent it. Most of its changes have been to the privacy settings for individual users.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote an open letter to Facebook users telling them they now have more direct control over who can view their information. Users can place limits on their profiles so the only their names can be seen by the general public. Also, posted information can be available to everyone, friends of friends or just the user’s friends, he said.
Ruchi Sanghvi, Facebook’s product manager for privacy, said that privacy settings for minors are more restrictive than for everyone else. When a minor shares a post or any information with everyone, it is shared with friends of friends at the most, she said. The information of a minor never really gets into the public, she said.
“Settings for minors will continue to be more restrictive than those for adults,” Sanghvi said in a written statement.
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