A 17-year-old boy in Perth, Australia has been sentenced to 12 months in juvenile detention for pressuring underage girls to perform sexual acts on a webcam and then posting the videos on Facebook, reports the Huffington Post. The boy, unidentified for his age, created a Facebook account under the name of a known student bully, Australian Associated Press reports. He told a 14-year-old girl she would be mobbed and injured at school if she didn’t expose and touch herself in front of a webcam, according to WA Today. The videos were recorded and posted without her knowledge…
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Rhode Island’s ban on Facebook in schools too dumb to be a joke
On Thursday, the Rhode Island legislature passed HB 5941, an “anti-bullying” measure that, among its other provisions, imposes a blanket ban on the use of “social networking sites” (whatever those are, post-web 2.0) on school grounds, reports Adam Goldstein, attorney for the Student Press Law Center. Because as everyone knows, anyone who encounters another user on a website is immediately bullied into submission. Right? There’s so much wrong with this bill that it’s hard to know where to start. What is a “social networking site,” really? The bill doesn’t define it…
…Read MoreFacebook bullies charged after victim tracks them down
When 18-year-old Ally Pfeiffer found a Facebook profile impersonating her and replacing her photograph with a picture of a cow to mock her weight, she cried. However, the Connecticut teen fought back, found the IP address for the bogus page and helped police trace the cruel behavior back to Sarah Johnson and Jeff Martone, her former classmates at a Bristol, Conn., high school, reports AOL News. And now, Johnson and Martone, both freshmen at the University of Connecticut, have been charged with criminal impersonation and second-degree harassment. Pfeiffer said she’s speaking out about her experience because she hopes it will prevent other young people from going through the pain she did. “If I help one teen or if I make one bully think twice before doing something I would feel 100 percent better,” she said in an interview with NBC’s “Today” show this morning. Both Martone, 19, and Johnson, 18, have admitted to creating the fake Facebook profile, which listed Pfeiffer’s “likes” as “being fat,” “whales,” “Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream” and “not running.” Pfeiffer said she and Johnson were close friends in high school. “When I first saw the page, I was completely devastated. I didn’t know who had done it at this point and was questioning why they chose me, why they’d say those things about me,” she told WFSB.com. But Pfeiffer, a freshman at the University of Hartford, said she didn’t want to let the cyberbullying ruin her life. “Some of my friends would have hung themselves over this,” she told the Bristol Press. “So I’m just glad that [Martone and Johnson] got a stable person trying to take a positive approach to dealing with it rather than someone who could have taken different action.”
Cyberbullying has gained increased scrutiny since the death of Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi earlier this year, who killed himself after his classmates allegedly posted a video of him having sex with another man…
Facebook works to remove anti-gay hate speech
Facebook is working with a gay-advocacy group to reduce the amount of hate speech and bullying on the online social hub, reports the Associated Press. Anti-gay bullying has been in the spotlight recently after the suicides of several gay teenagers, including Rutgers freshman Tyler Clementi, garnered national attention. According to police, the 19-year-old jumped off the George Washington Bridge after his roommate secretly recorded him with another male student and distributed video online. The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation said it reached out to Facebook last week after Internet bullies flooded a page set up to honor teens who recently killed themselves in response to anti-gay hate. The page, set up by a Facebook user, asks supporters to wear purple next Wednesday in memory of the teenagers. Purple represents “spirit” in the rainbow flag that’s the symbol of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community. On Friday afternoon, most of the comments on the page were from supporters…
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