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Nurses victims of cyber-bullying - study

  Nurses are struggling with cyberbullying by patients and families, a new study has found. Massey University PhD graduate Dr Natalia D’Souza wrote her thesis on workplace cyberbullying and found that nurses are not only bullied by other staff, but also by patients and their families. Dr D’Souza says patient care responsibilities make it difficult for nurses to block communication if they are being bullied by electronic channels. “I was told about one case where a nurse was being bullied by a patient’s mother, and she used her son to gain access. “She would call to ask for help for her son, but then start abusing the nurse, so the nurse was hesitant to block the calls in case it was a genuine emergency.” Many nurses were also concerned about how being cyberbullied on social media would affect their professional reputation. “Sometimes their personal contact details have been posted online,…

Cyberbullying may double risk of self-harm, suicidal behaviour

  LONDON: Children and youngsters who face cyberbullying are more than twice as likely to self-harm and enact suicidal behaviour, a new study has found. The research also suggests that it is not just the victims of cyberbullying that are more vulnerable to suicidal behaviours, but the perpetrators themselves are at higher risk of experiencing suicidal thoughts and behaviours as well. Cyberbullying is using electronic communication to bully another, for instance by sending intimidating, threatening or unpleasant messages using social media. Researchers from Swansea University, University of Oxford and University of Birmingham in the UK looked at over 150,000 children and young people across 30 countries, over a 21-year period. The findings, published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, highlighted the significant impact that cyberbullying involvement (as bullies and victims) can have on children and young people. The researchers say it shows an urgent need for effective prevention and…

Cyberbullying can take lasting toll on teens

  Camryn Cowdin was checking her Facebook page when she saw hateful posts from a person she considered a friend. Her name was never used, but she knew the words were about her. “He would directly reference a comment or situation that happened between him and I,” Cowdin, 16, said. He threatened to end their friendship. He’d say, `You’re dead to us.’ ” The comments left her feeling depressed, Cowdin said. She cried every night. She didn’t want to go to school. “He pretty much tried to ruin me,” said Cowdin, a student at Highlands Ranch High School who loves making costumes for Comic Con, journaling and music — a set of headphones often hang around her neck. “I know a lot of beautiful people who have been ruined by social media.” Cowdin’s experience of being bullied over a social media platform is part of an increasing national trend in…

Kenya: Moral Cop Defends Deputy Governor Whose Private Video Leaked

  Kenya Film Classification Board (KFCB) boss Ezekiel Mutua has described as barbaric the trending video showing the Kirinyaga Deputy Governor, Peter Ndambiri, naked and at the mercy of a group of men filming him and a naked woman beside him. The video is circulating on WhatsApp, where it was released on Tuesday evening, and has become the subject of debate on morning radio and Twitter. Dr Mutua, dubbed Kenya’s Moral Policeman for the stand he often takes on obscenity, jumped onto the wave Wednesday morning, saying filming the deputy governor was beyond justification and describing it as “barbaric, outrageous and a violation of human rights.” “In my view, the invasion of privacy and primitive harassment of a couple in private, whatever their sin or crime, is the evidence of how low we have sunk as a society. If the video doing rounds is true, then this is a major…

Tribeca doc ‘Netizens’ highlights the online harassment of women

  Cynthia Lowen’s Netizens is about three women whose lives have been profoundly affected by cyber sexual harassment. Making its U.S. premiere at Tribeca Film Festival this week, the documentary details the various forms these crimes take, including cyber-stalking, the posting of non-consensual pornography and character attacks. The latter led Tina, a successful businesswoman and one of Lowen’s subjects, to be rebuffed by potential employers, including J.P. Morgan. Through intimate and often moving testimony, as well as brief interviews with experts, Lowen crafts an absorbing documentary that is part biography and part discourse. She does so in a cinéma vérité style, with a minimal use of music, leaving viewers with the feeling that they are in the same room with her subjects. In the opening scene of Netizens, Carrie Goldberg, a New York City lawyer and another of the three women profiled the documentary, is investigating a rape that was…

Here’s Everything You’re Not Allowed To Post On Facebook

  Facebook has publicly released its most complete community guidelines to date after many years keeping the specific rules its moderators used to govern the platform secret. The update tacked over 5000 more words onto the already unwieldy document, which now includes highly specific examples of banned or heavily regulated content. Is any of it at all surprising? Well, yes. Most platforms have rules that outline common-sense genres of content they’d rather not be liable for - harassment, hate speech, gore, child endangerment, etc. - and these are no different. But as a reflection of its size and global reach, Facebook’s guidelines include some of the most granular examples of what not to do online. Cannibalism is off limits. “Sexualized massages” are specifically barred. Staged animal fights won’t fly, and neither will videos of animals being processed for food. Images of buttocks or an anus are a no-go, “unless photoshopped…

Deepfake: Fake Obama video insulting Trump is a disturbing trend

  A realistic-looking video that seemed to show former President Barack Obama cussing and calling President Donald Trump a “total and complete dips—,” went viral on Tuesday, bringing attention to the dangers of a controversial video-editing technology that many have called “the future of fake news.” About halfway through the video, originally published by BuzzFeed, it is revealed that Obama had actually not uttered those words and that they were actually said by “Get Out” director and writer Jordan Peele, whose voice and mouth had been digitally inserted into an original — much less scandalous — video of the former president. Here’s the full video: Peele, BuzzFeed, and Monkeypaw Productions used a controversial but widely available software to make the video, in an effort to demonstrate the dangers of “deepfakes,” aka digitally manipulated videos that have the power to “make it look like anyone is saying [or doing] anything at…

Revenge pornography in Zimbabwe: A victim’s dilemma

  The allegations are that a young woman committed suicide after her boyfriend posted indiscreet videos of her on the internet. Whether the story is true or not is not as relevant as the issues it raised. What does the law say about pornography and even more so revenge pornography? Is there any recourse for victims given that pornography at whatever level is illegal in Zimbabwe? Revenge pornography, also called non-consensual pornography, is the unauthorised sharing and distribution of sexual images of another person without their consent. It is often committed by ex-lovers to spite, hurt and humiliate their victim and maximise shame. In extreme cases, the graphic images are sent to the victim’s family and friends and in the worst cases may be upload them onto porn websites where they give their contact details in order to maximise the nuisance and damage The law Zimbabwe Section 13 of the…

Revenge pornography ban law tossed out in Texas!

  A Texas appeals court last week ruled that the US state’s Relationship Privacy Act, which prohibits the disclosure or promotion of intimate images without the consent of those depicted, is unconstitutional. Enacted in 2015, the Texas law was intended as a way to stop what’s known as revenge porn, in which a person discloses intimate sexual images, online or otherwise, to cause harm and embarrassment to another person. The law covered images to those taken under circumstances when the depicted person had a reasonable expectation that the material would remain private. It’s one of 38 state laws that have been enacted in the US to combat revenge porn, also referred to as nonconsensual distribution of pornographic images because the perpetrator’s motivation – revenge or otherwise – wouldn’t mitigate the act. In its consideration of an appeal by defendant Jordan Bartlett Jones, accused in a civil complaint last year of…

Twitter Plans To Prevent Revenge Porn With Stricter Policies, But Will It Work?

Social media has always had problems with filtering and monitoring inappropriate content, but those issues have been extra toxic on Twitter in particular because it’s a unique type of service: it’s built on microblogging, meaning it’s short, it’s quick, and it spreads fast. It’s not difficult to find hate speech, propaganda, sexism, racism, and all kinds of negative isms on Twitter. Just two or three clicks plus plenty of scrolling and users will immediately see the site’s dark, appalling side — and that’s exactly the problem, how easy it is to get there. Twitter epicly fails at shutting down inappropriate content, and that hasn’t really changed for a long time. Some users even regard Twitter as an incredibly toxic place on the internet, which is a pretty staggering description for a site that’s not even niche. Is it cancer for the eyes? Not quite — but it’s headed there at an alarming pace….