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Media Literacy Part 13: How to Deal with Trolls 280 Views


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Transcript

00:01

We speak student!

00:05

Media Literacy

00:07

How to Deal with Trolls

00:09

a la Shmoop

00:12

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

00:14

But if you're cyberbullied,

00:17

how do you deal with it?

00:19

There's all kinds of ways.

00:21

You can end up throwing gasoline on a fire

00:23

and making it a lot worse.

00:24

Yeah, the first thing to remember is just

00:26

that the person being cyberbullied

00:28

is always the victim.

00:30

So even if the person

00:32

being bullied does something that makes it worse,

00:33

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

00:37

But there are ways that you can deal with cyberbullies

00:40

that can make it less extreme

00:42

or hopefully stop it before it snowballs.

00:45

So the first thing is just don't engage.

00:48

If you are being cyberbullied,

00:50

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

00:53

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

00:55

Why are you doing this to me?"

00:56

[ evil laugh ]

00:59

Just ignore.

01:00

And it takes a very thick skin

01:02

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

01:05

these days is a thicker skin.

01:07

What if someone's relentless?

01:09

What happens? How do -- Do you just

01:11

ignore it forever?

01:12

Right. So, no.

01:13

There comes a point -- If you ignore it,

01:14

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

01:18

Still don't engage.

01:19

It's at that point that you want to

01:21

report it.

01:22

[ phone rings ]

01:23

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

01:25

Do you want to

01:26

talk to a friend of yours

01:28

who knows that person and maybe they can

01:30

kind of try and intervene?

01:33

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

01:37

maybe report it to your parent or your teacher.

01:40

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

01:44

If it gets incredibly serious,

01:46

you can report it directly to the police.

01:48

It is illegal.

01:49

So you kind of have to decide

01:51

how much you're affected by it

01:53

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

01:56

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

01:58

Or do you need to go to the authorities?

02:01

You should just never be embarrassed to

02:03

go to your parents or teacher or the police,

02:07

because what this person's doing

02:09

is 100% wrong and anyone

02:11

who doesn't agree with that is a moron.

02:13

[ mooing ]

02:15

So, Deb, what is a troll?

02:18

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

02:20

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

02:22

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

02:26

A troll is basically anyone

02:28

who posts anonymously on the Internet.

02:31

And you usually think of it as a negative connotation.

02:33

So trolls are anonymous cyberbullies.

02:35

They're also the people who

02:36

go onto online forums and just post random comments

02:41

about stuff and they won't identify themselves.

02:43

So trolls are almost the worst of the cyberbullies,

02:46

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

02:50

"Here's who I am.

02:51

Here's what my thoughts are about you

02:53

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

02:54

Instead, they are doing all that bullying

02:57

while hiding behind the shield of anonymity.

03:00

So they're almost the worst of the cyberbullies,

03:03

if you can even have a scale of badness

03:05

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

03:06

because every one is terrible.

03:08

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

03:10

harder to take action.

03:12

If you had to call the authorities,

03:14

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

03:17

But this isn't someone where you can say,

03:19

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

03:22

Can you tell him to stop talking crap about me

03:24

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

03:26

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

03:30

or your community. And instead,

03:31

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

03:33

who just decide that they wanna --

03:36

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

03:39

To make other people feel worse. Okay.

03:41

Trolls. Avoid them.

03:44

[ whoop ]

03:45

How do you deal with cyberbullies?

03:48

What happens if a cyberbully becomes relentless?

03:53

What is a troll?

03:58

[ laughter ]

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