My Project: 365 Creative Writing Prompts
Day 123: How to deal with cyber bullying
If my Facebook friends haven’t heard from me in a while … that’s because I’m in Facebook jail at the moment. Apparently, I made a comment that went against Facebook standards. This is what happened …
I belong to several writer’s groups and one of those groups accepted a new member last Thursday. Now I know that one shouldn’t judge people by their looks, but this woman was clearly not a writer or remotely interested in becoming a writer.
In her acceptance picture, she posed in a dress that clung to her generous curves like a second skin. A dress that ended just under her backside and drew attention to her bosom and backside.
I clicked on her name, was redirected to her profile page, where I found several more highly risqué pictures. All pictures of her posing in skimpy dresses showing off her bosom and backside.
I commented that this was not a writer but a hooker looking for customers. Some 115 comments followed, most of members who (all but one – a man) agreed with me. This was a troll.
The membership of the new woman became even more suspicious when she didn’t respond to any of the comments. By that I mean, if I post a picture and I get negative feedback, you bet your bottom dollar I’m going to say something. But this woman did nothing, not one word.
To cut a long story short, the fact that I had called this woman a hooker went against Facebook standards and I was put in their jail. So, I switched to my other Facebook account, an account I mainly use for gaming.
While scrolling through the homepage news feed, I came across a post that read ‘I wish I was beautiful’. A number of comments followed assuring this woman that she was beautiful. As for me, I thought this was an attention seeking statement, aimed for others to stroke her ego. When I said as much a string of abusive comments followed.
One woman even stated that this woman had lost both her parents in one year and that we should be nice to her. To me that made her statement of her wish for beauty even worse. You would think that someone who had lost a loved one would wish to have that person back, or be able to communicate with him, her or them. Instead, this woman wished for beauty!
More comments followed, abusive comments, with some very nasty words. I tried to report these abusive comments but there was no way I could do that. This made me wonder … when I call someone a hooker I get reported, but when someone calls me a b…h and a c..t I can’t do anything!
I wasn’t gonna stand for this cyber bullying though, so I did what any person with common sense would do … I blocked the bullies. There, problem was taken care of. That’s how I deal with cyber bullying.
This experience has thought me a lesson though … I don’t blindly accept friend requests anymore. At least half of my ‘friends’ on Facebook aren’t friends at all, they’re not even acquaintances, they are people who at one time or another wanted something from me, usually a gift in a game.
Those who are familiar with gaming on Facebook know that in order to exchange gifts one has to be friends. So, I won’t be accepting friend requests any time soon anymore. If you send me a friend request and I don’t know you, you better believe that I will look at your profile page and if I don’t like what I see your request will be deleted.
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