Cyber bullying … about radio, ffs?

It’s Flashback Friday.  Every Friday we bring back a golden oldie article from yesteryear. A chance for you to re-read it and see if it is still relevant today!

The world of radio anoraksia on the web is a very cruel one. I’m guessing it’s probably no different to other subjects over which feelings run strong, but being a free-thinking radio anorak I do find it uncomfortable to watch the bullying. Sure, yes, I’ve had my fair share of being bullied for not toeing the line and keeping to the accepted truth on certain things to do with the subject of our common love. I’ve been hounded because I dared to ask the wrong questions or indicated that I actually knew the real truth about events now long gone. But, this isn’t about me.

What I’ve been watching of late is one main cyber-bully who has taken his bullying to an extreme level. He has opened a blog which carries an identical name to my favourite discussion and debate website http://www.anoraknation.com and from his version of this otherwise good and gentle place he hides his cyber-bullying under the blanket of ‘satire’ and ‘parody’. It’s very rarely satire and very rarely parody. It’s more usually direct bullying. Indeed, his blog openly boasts that it “has even more of the gratuitous bullying and victimisation that other places allow or encourage.” It’s all done anonymously, the bully refusing to identify himself, of course, due to that streak of cowardice that is there within any bully, cyber or real life.

Not content with cyber-bullying via his own blog, he also uses a multitude of names to cyber-bully via another radio discussion board. For him, the beauty of the particular discussion board he’s picked to bully via is of course that he can remain anonymous. Users do not have to log-in or authenticate (he’s been banned from most of the discussion boards that do), but are free to just pick a name and then write what they wish. In this particular case he rarely writes about anything else other than how much he hates certain people and how much they are trouble makers. Indeed, he’ll even write this or try to stir-up bad feeling when his victims are not present or haven’t posted anything for a very long time. Any conversation that might otherwise be plodding along ok he will hijack and try to insert some form of derogatory comment about his current victim into. His intention is to constantly remind others that he has declared that his chosen victims are bad and cannot be trusted and should be shunned or abused. Anybody disagreeing with him will be given a taster of victimisation in order to silence them. It usually does.

He will go to great lengths to provide evidence to support his various claims. He will spend hours trawling through what his victims may have written in the past, selectively quoting sections as support. Often he is trying to prove that his victim is, to use his words, ‘mad’, ‘mentally disturbed’, ‘bipolar’, etc, alongside various swear words. Whatever it might actually be labelled, he is determined to provide proof positive that the victim is definitely suffering from some form of mental illness. Having satisfied himself, and anybody that might believe him, that the victim has a mental illness, he then demonstrates how to treat a person with a mental illness.

In his eyes, a person suffering from a mental illness should be bullied. He wants to laugh at or ridicule the mentally ill. If this was not the case, he’d stop the bullying having demonstrated that his victim is mentally ill, but of course he doesn’t stop. Apparently it’s ok to provide relentless anonymous ‘satirical’ and ‘parody’ of the mentally ill.

And then… Suddenly something different happened! Yay!!

This past weekend was brilliant because of the silence. Who knows why, but the cyber-bully went quiet. Maybe he had a weekend off, or problems connecting to the internet, but there he was gone. For a few glorious days at least his blog remained silent, no longer spewing its content against whoever might be the latest victim, and his multiple aliases on the discussion board all disappeared. Conversations were able to return to normal about all manner of things without fear of his judge, jury and executioner personalities suddenly appearing in order to destroy debate and discussion he’d decided was against his personal policy.

Sadly, in the longer term there isn’t much that can be done to protect the victims from these types of cyber-bullies. It has to get a little more intense before the police will become involved. All bullies usually build to a peak, enjoying the discomfort of their victims along the way, until eventually they cross that line and something terrible happens to their victim and it’s all too late. Let’s hope this won’t be happening anytime soon in the world of radio anoraksia, and that eventually the law will change to deal more severely with these bullies at the early stages of their career.