ENG101

Cyber Bully

A friend of mine, Kelsey May, was a sophomore at High School. On Sunday morning, Kelsey May turned on her laptop and logged onto Facebook. She had been talking to Bryan, a guy she met while looking through Facebook. Kelsey thought Bryan was really cute and she was eager to meet him in real life but as she logged onto Facebook she had noticed that she had way too many Facebook messages and notifications. Unknowingly, Kelsey had actually been, "catfished", a term used to describe a person who disguises themselves as someone else on social networking sites. Two of Kelsey's classmates had secretly made a fake Facebook under the name Bryan Turner to get revenge on Kelsey. The whole time when Kelsey thought she was talking to her dream guy, Bryan, when she was really confessing her love for this guy who she has never met to these two girls. The girls ended up taking screenshots of the Facebook messages and putting them up on Facebook and Twitter along with a very mean caption. Word soon got around that Kelsey got "catfished" and many kids began to make fun of her, calling her desperate, etc. What these two girls had done to Kelsey is called cyber bullying. They kept on harassing Kelsey on Facebook as much and as often as they could. The bullying would not stop. A week later, on Sunday night, Kelsey May took her own life. Kelsey took her own life due to cyber bullying but she is not the first. Many have become depressed, have tried takin their own life or have taken their own life. Possible solutions to counter attack the urge/attempt to cyber bullying are if parents were to limit or restrict their children to what they can or can not do on the Internet, social networking sites had more options to where the user can know if the person they are talking to is real or not, and if teens were more well informed about the consequences to bullying someone over the Internet. Another solution to the Cyber Bullying issues is if social networking sites had a verification system where they could verify that each person is who they say they are. By verifying each person online, chances of someone being "catfished" goes down by a lot. This also would make the site safer. Social Networking sites can subscribe to a verification site to where a person, in order to make and account on any website, must prove they are who they say they are. Limiting a child's internet use and keeping a track of when they get online is a good way to ensure that one's child does not do anything they do not need to be doing online. If Kelsey were to of just of told her parents when she was getting on to the computer then maybe she would have been able to prevent many of the things that happened to her. By telling her parents what was going on she would of been able to address the issue with them then from then on her parents could of told her