Today, many internet users report that they are victims of Cyber Harassment. The classic story that is constantly being spoken is that those who commit this crime are good individuals in daily life, but they turn into bad individuals when they dive into the digital world.
Most of us have experienced these abuses at least once. These harassments sometimes start with liking your photo on social media in the middle of the night or downloading anonymous tracking applications to the device you use.
The term Cyber Harassment means harming other users using the internet or other technologies, or tracking them anonymously and collecting information about them. This type of cyber activity is extremely popular today. So much so that the age range and scope of the people who are exposed to or commit this crime is so wide that the reported range has advanced from school children to married couple separations, from social media phenomena to stars around the world.
In 2019 alone, close to 1 million 16-year-old American citizens were victims of Cyber Harassment. Complaints from locals are often about receiving harassing messages, unsolicited online posts about them, or being traced to their whereabouts.
Dungeons&Dragons Harassment
A Cyber Harassment news was shared by a group of friends playing the fantasy role-playing game "Dungeons and Dragons" on the "Discord" platform. The abuser was, in this scenario, a mutual friend of the people playing the game who wanted to include themselves in this game group.
Reddit user "Polar Barrel" who reported the incident said:
‘’He was always trying to get himself into our playgroup, but we always made it clear to him that there was no room for an extra person. Afterwards, this friend's answers to us and especially his attitude started to be very disturbing and negative.‘’
Based on what Polar Barrel wrote on Reddit, the Cyber Harassment's sabotage of the game in different dimensions by mocking even their sexual orientation, and even drawing pornographic sketches of characters created by other players began to annoy other players.
After the last drops, the statements of Polar Barrel about this Cyber Bully continue as follows:
"This ongoing behavior started to grow to such disturbing dimensions that this attitude started to spread to our social life, then to the communication we established with each other in our social life. So much so that one of our friends was sexually bullied by this person.”
The group of friends, who were uncomfortable after these situations, gave advice to this Cyber Bully to think and change what he had done and drove them away.
“Even though we clearly conveyed our stance to him not to contact us before we contact you again, he started sending us long messages and telling our friend that our friend should be pleased for what he did. Even though we told him to stop, when he didn't stop, we blocked him from all our accounts."
Fear and Despair
After this incident, even though Polar Barrel and his friends thought they were getting rid of the cyber harasser, they continued to follow what they were talking about by creating accounts that were unaware of Polar Barrel and his friends.
Polar Barrel - we don't know what his new account is, we can't block his new account because we don't know his name.
In conclusion;
With the spread of the internet, bad people are multiplying, people who are cute and good in their daily lives suddenly gain courage on the internet and turn into terrible Cyberbullies. While many people can never hurt a person in real life, when the job is moved to the keyboard and screen, it becomes easier to reach other people, so it can hurt people.
Even though we want to take measures such as simply blocking accounts to prevent Cyberbullies, the anonymous follow-up of Cyberbullies from new accounts turns the case into Cyber Harassment.
The more people know about cyberbullying and harassment, the easier it is to take action. For this reason, if you encounter cyber harassers, you can report the issue to your family, friends and law enforcement and take action.
