On the nonsense of "cyberbullying"

This article in The Australian represents some of the latest noise in a steadily increasing clamour in the Australian mainstream media about the phenomenon of "cyberbullying", which is defined as "harassment via text messaging, internet or email" (that's right, internet or email. It's clear that "internet" should be glossed here as "social networking sites", like Facebook or MySpace). Since the beginning of this trend I have had very little respect for the notion of cyberbullying as a serious problem and have been disappointed to see that the vast majority of discussion on the matter betrays stunning ignorance on the part of those most upset by it. Although it's a trifling issue not overly relevant to the overall debate, there's some evidence of this in The Australian's embarassing claim that "the latest addition to the cyber vocabulary is "flaming" -- a form of online verbal abuse using capital letters to express aggression". Use of the word "flaming" to refer to online abuse is, of course, as old as computer networking itself. The jargon file, the most authoritative source on hacker slang, suggests that this use was practiced at places like MIT in the late 60s. You don't need to be deeply immersed in hacker culture to know this, either. Anybody with any appreciable internet usage - certainly anybody who is actually qualified to be writing for the IT section of a major newspaper - heard the term "flaming" years before the term "cyberbullying" had been dreamed up. But I digress.

Much more troubling than the media's failure to get basic terminology right is the fact that nowhere in the media have I seen anybody bring up the most immediately obvious difference between cyberbullying and real bullying, the difference which makes cyberbullying a non-issue: the ability to effortlessly block the bully with 100% efficiency. It might be very nearly or even completely impossible for a young child to avoid the schoolyard bully who catches the same bus as him, or who hangs out in central hallways or infront of the most popular piece of playground equipment - but it takes literally less than a minute to stop somebody from ever contacting you again via email or any of the major instant messaging or social networking sites. The process is quick, painless, free and foolproof.

I expect a lot of people would retort to this fact with the suggestion that we cannot reasonably expect young children to know how to perform such complicated tasks with their computers (a rather disingenuous claim, as most school aged children either are or quickly will become more proficient with using computers than the parents who would make the claim). This argument can pretty much be rejected outright. Here's a screenshot of the conversation window of Windows Live Messenger (courtesy of www.msgweb.nl), which is by far the most commonly used instant messaging platform amongst Australian youth. The icons along the top, with the pictures of telephones and playing cards, are used to send other people files, initiate voice conversations, play games with them, etc. Children sure as hell know that they're there and know how to use them: they control some of the main functionality of the program. The rightmost icon, of the green face behind a prohibitive red circle? It "blocks" the person you're currently talking to. They can't send you messages anymore. They can't see whether or not you're online. They cannot bully you. And it will stay that way until you decide to unblock them. It's not a complicated series of menus of dialogs children have to navigate to achieve this, they have to use a single intuitive-looking button in a familiar part of the window. If they can't figure it out, their parents certainly should be able to. If the children and their parents combined can't work this out in one night, or if parents aren't being involved at all at with what their young children are doing online, then there are much bigger problems afoot than cyberbullying.

Even if we grant both school children and their parents incredible levels of stupidity, a half hour classroom session and a pamphlet sent home with screenshots at the start of each school year would get people up to speed on this. It's just not a big problem, at all. Yet, to quote the Australian article, "the Government has admitted it is yet to fully understand the problem -- or the extent of it". That's quite a worrying indictment of our government's understanding of some of the most basic and common things that happen on the internet. What's going to happen when they try to tackle an internet related problem that's actually...a problem?

I have never seen any media treatment of the issue even mention that blocking contact from people on the internet is possible, let alone trivial. Instead they spout ridiculous ideas about how the government can help solve this problem, about how there should be laws passed against cyberbullying and court cases should be held (this isn't suggested in the referenced article above, but it certainly has been discussed in the media). What planet are these people on to think that these solutions are even possible, to say nothing of sensible? For the government to monitor all the various different forms of communication by which cyberbullying supposedly takes place (many of which are based on proprietary protocols subject to compatibility-breaking changes without noice) in anything close to real time is technically infeasible without spending a truly vast amount of time and money, entirely out of proportion to the severity of the problem, and would also constitute giving the government a disturbing amount of control over the private communication of citizens, which is something fraught with problems both ideological and, as I discussed recently, practical.

Without such incredibly expensive and invasive monitoring, any sort of court cases over the issue are out of the question on the simple grounds that nobody can prove beyond reasonable doubt that anybody said anything to anyone. Are we going to take little Johnny's word and an easily doctored screenshot or print out as sufficient evidence to find little Timmy guilty of something? And even if we are, what punishment are we going to impose? Is little Timmy to be banned from Windows Live Messenger for some period of time? How would this be enforced? Timmy's parents' ISP could block connections from their computer to known Live Messenger servers (in principle, that is, once again for them to actually start doing this in practice would cost time and money to put the procedures in place), but that would indiscriminantly block everyone in Timmy's household from using the service, including his well-behaved and angelic sister who has never flamed anybody in her life. It would also do nothing to stop Timmy from using emails or Facebook or any other online medium to continue doing exactly what he was doing before. The entire concept of any sort of government control of the problem is plainly riddled with problems and shortcommings and should not be taken seriously by anyone.

In summary: cyberbullying is something it is realistically impossible for the government to fix and absolutely trivial for individual parents, or even their children by themseles, to fix. All it would take is a minimal amount of education about something they really should have figured out for themselves by now. The supposed severity of the problem as it has been portrayed in the media is a gross exaggeration born staggering technial ignorance, and perhaps also cynical acceptance of the fact that sensationalist news about supposedly serious problems sells well. I only hope someone in the media or government actually realises this eventually, and I look forward to the day I never have to hear the term cyberbullying again.