Everybody enjoys going on Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and Tumblr. As much fun and enjoyable these websites are, they could be a huge cause of cyber bullying and suicide.
One of these cases of cyber bullying unfortunately took place in Megan Meier's life. Megan Meier was a victim of cyber bullying through Myspace. Megan was talking to a fake boy named "Josh"on Myspace and he seemed great at first until the tone of the messages had begun to change. He then began to tell her that he "no longer wanted to be friends with her" and he heard that "she was not nice to her friends". According to Wikipedia, The last few messages between Megan and Josh escalated through AOL Messenger when the conversation ended with this;
"Everybody in O'Fallon knows how you are. You are a bad person and everybody hates you. Have a shitty rest of your life. The world would be a better place without you." Meier responded with a message reading "You’re the kind of boy a girl would kill herself over."
Unfortunately this is the reason that Megan killed herself, through bullying due to the media.
Unfortunately, there have been other cases of cyber Bullying through other social networking cites such as Formspring.me. Formspring is a website that allows people to ask questions anonymously. This has been a big cause of cyber bullying in the life of Phoebe Prince and Alexis Pilkington. Both girls committed suicide through cyber bullying on Formspring.me
Foster Kamer says that;
"Formspring.me focuses on the application’s “evil” aspect. “The opportunity to say unbecoming [stuff] is simply endless,” he writes. And because the site is so addictive, even if you “endlessly bomb someone’s Formspring with hate mail, or affection, or subversive questions,” Kamer writes, “you know they’ll read it all, because they’re using Formspring, and they’re not going to turn the box off, because they’re trying to get to the good stuff: the questions they want to answer.”"
Twitter can also be a site of cyber bullying after Rutger's student, Tyler Clementi killed himself after a video was uploaded of him making fun of his sexual orientation with him and another person.
Should all social Media websites be monitored for carefully to prevent these horrible acts of cyber bullying? Is there anyway to stop people from committing these crimes in the first place? It is clear that cyber bullying is escalated by the use of social media, unfortunately, but hopefully in the future we will find a successful way to get rid of it all together.
