Adrian's Reflection on Cyber Bullying

The above two video clips are The Pearl Report broadcasted on 21 December 2008 talking about cyber bullying in Hong Kong. From the video, we can see that the victims, such as Christina Chan, was bad-mouthed by anonymous netizens online. Some of the words of these netizens are very personal or even sexual. And through the so-called "human flesh search engine", the personal information and private photos of the victims are disclosed and circulated on the Internet, violating their privacy. The bullies can further use the information they get to reach the victim's real person and pose a threat to them in the real world.

This report studies cyber bullying in Hong Kong deeply and raises a number of points that are worth discussing. But there is one thing I concern about, i.e. "human flesh search engine". It has been a debatable issue recently. As we all know, some of the victims of the engine has done some bad things in the real world. So netizens expose their personal information, such as their name, address, phone number, the name of their school, and photos to "punish" them. The netizens would also produce videos or pictures to tease them and to make fun of them. However, is it a proper way to punish them? Should the victims bear such hugh "costs" (being humiliated or harassed online or even in the real world) because of what they have done? And more importantly, do netizens have the right or power to punish them? It reminds me the rape case in LambdaMoo Franco talked about today and the question of who has the right to toad Mr Bungle. (I don't know if I spell the name correctly)

Another question about "human flesh search engine" is: why netizens are capable of searching out the information of the victims? A possible answer I can think of is that we unconsciously disclose too much personal information on the Internet through our blogs and social websites. So it relates to the issue of privacy. As the US President Obama said, we should be careful when we are using social websites like facebook because the thing we put on it today is no more a secret and people can still find it out after many years. So we should think twice before we share something personal on the Internet.

Every coin has two sides. The Internet brings us a lot of convenience. But if we use it in a bad way, it will cause a lot of problems. So we should use it properly.