We all have seen it...someone posts something that is TMI. Someone posts something that is rude. Someone posts derogatory messages, jokes, comments, etc. Social medias have been used and abused and made it that much easier to hurt other people. Bullying has been taken to the extreme by leaving the school hallways or the workplace breakroom. We now encounter it web-wide. We probably have been guilty of some mild form at the very least ourselves at some point.
Kids have their Facebooks plastered with hateful, hurtful posts from that ex-friend or life-long enemy who is jealous or hurt or plainly likes to inflict pain. Adults have to watch for a wrong step in political opinions or lifestyle choices. Twitter, Facebook, Blog networks and all these other instant medias have brought the social consequences and reach much broader.
Within the last month alone I have seen personal attacks over political stances, moral stances, religious stances, military affiliations, personal opinions, etc. People forget so quickly that when they are typing on their computer, there is a face with a heart that can bruise who reads it.
The military community rose up recently against a woman who expressed her opinion in a very public way (her personal blog with public settings). She expressed an opinion that quite frankly pissed most of us off. Her post was done in frustration and came off not only judgmental but condescending to a whole group of military wives. It took less than 36hrs before her husband's Chain of Command was brought into the situation and her husband had to have meetings where he was most certainly lectured heavily over his actions and hers online. It took even less time to have a nation's worth of military families know who she is, who her husband is, and much of her recent life and that she was now a target of disdain, bullying, and fuming balls of anger expressed in a range of insults, derogatory blogs/facebook posts/tweets/etc., and a very small handful of supportive or at least compassionately worded rebuffs.
Now, that specific instance, I was full of anger and downright ready to verbally draw and quarter her. Thankfully I wasn't able to because she disabled her comments and so all I could do to join the fray was follow blogs across the military communities and FB updates to people. I never resorted to hurling insults on her character but saw many and that was depressing to me. Her opinion did not reflect that she was a cheating military spouse in any way and to have the slurs directly saying that was as out of line as her opinion was against the NG and their spouses.
The internet is dangerous. We forget that there are people on the other side of that computer screen. We forget that we have obligations to respect people AS people. We forget too quickly that feelings hurt and that lasts almost as long as the things put out into the world via the internet. They say it never truly gets deleted and for her, it's true. Her posts in both original and edited forms can be found on other blogs copied and pasted for the world to peruse even after she deleted her blog.
This is an unfortunate example of the internet's potential danger to not only others but to yourself. There are more horrifying examples of bullying across the web that ended in suicide even. I'd just like people to take a minute before posting and find a better outlet for frustrations, for anger, or for excited rantings. Make sure that what you say is what you should say and not just what you want to say at that precise moment because just like saying something to someone's face, once the words are out there, you can't pull them back.
