ShmoopTube

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We speak student!

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Media Literacy

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How to Deal with Trolls

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a la Shmoop

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So, this topic's probably worthy of an entire course.

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But if you're cyberbullied,

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how do you deal with it?

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There's all kinds of ways.

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You can end up throwing gasoline on a fire

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and making it a lot worse.

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Yeah, the first thing to remember is just

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that the person being cyberbullied

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is always the victim.

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So even if the person

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being bullied does something that makes it worse,

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it's not their fault. It's always the bully's fault.

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But there are ways that you can deal with cyberbullies

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that can make it less extreme

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or hopefully stop it before it snowballs.

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So the first thing is just don't engage.

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If you are being cyberbullied,

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just don't talk back to the person. Don't say,

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"Hey, you're being mean." or "Stop doing this.

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Why are you doing this to me?"

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[ evil laugh ]

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Just ignore.

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And it takes a very thick skin

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to ignore. That's something that we all need to be able to build up

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these days is a thicker skin.

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What if someone's relentless?

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What happens? How do -- Do you just

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ignore it forever?

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Right. So, no.

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There comes a point -- If you ignore it,

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and the person continues, that's when you need to do something about it.

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Still don't engage.

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It's at that point that you want to

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report it.

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[ phone rings ]

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You have to figure out who you want to report it to.

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Do you want to

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talk to a friend of yours

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who knows that person and maybe they can

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kind of try and intervene?

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If it's someone who you don't really know anyone in common,

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maybe report it to your parent or your teacher.

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Someone who can -- An adult who can take some sort of action against it.

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If it gets incredibly serious,

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you can report it directly to the police.

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It is illegal.

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So you kind of have to decide

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how much you're affected by it

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and how terrible it is what this person's doing. And decide

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do you wanna try and fix it yourself with some help?

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Or do you need to go to the authorities?

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You should just never be embarrassed to

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go to your parents or teacher or the police,

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because what this person's doing

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is 100% wrong and anyone

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who doesn't agree with that is a moron.

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[ mooing ]

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So, Deb, what is a troll?

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- Because that's a word that gets tossed around a lot with this. - It does.

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Yeah, "troll" gets tossed around all the time.

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And we're not talking about those little fuzzy-haired guys.

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A troll is basically anyone

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who posts anonymously on the Internet.

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And you usually think of it as a negative connotation.

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So trolls are anonymous cyberbullies.

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They're also the people who

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go onto online forums and just post random comments

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about stuff and they won't identify themselves.

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So trolls are almost the worst of the cyberbullies,

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because they're not even big enough people to say,

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"Here's who I am.

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Here's what my thoughts are about you

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and here's who it's coming from."

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Instead, they are doing all that bullying

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while hiding behind the shield of anonymity.

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So they're almost the worst of the cyberbullies,

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if you can even have a scale of badness

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when it comes to cyberbullying, which you can't,

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because every one is terrible.

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But these are the people where it's a little bit

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harder to take action.

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If you had to call the authorities,

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then they might be able to find out who that person is.

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But this isn't someone where you can say,

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"Hey, so-and-so, I know you're friends with this guy.

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Can you tell him to stop talking crap about me

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on the Internet?" You can't do that because you don't know who it is.

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And often times trolls aren't even part of your school

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or your community. And instead,

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they're people on the other side of the country or world

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who just decide that they wanna --

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They feel bad about themselves and they wanna say nasty things about people.

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To make other people feel worse. Okay.

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Trolls. Avoid them.

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[ whoop ]

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How do you deal with cyberbullies?

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What happens if a cyberbully becomes relentless?

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What is a troll?

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[ laughter ]

Full Transcript