Sociopathic Media: what constitutes online harassment?
People are human, and make mistakes. Often we say things we regret (or must soon appear to regret). If your outburst is simply muttered angrily, you might get away with it by relying on the ASSCAN… formula (my favourite variation of which is "Act Surprised, Show Concern, Admit Nothing, Deny Everything, Demand Proof").
However if your outburst is readily accessible online you might as well forget that! You're going to need to be careful what you psot. A New Brunswick principal has recently warned students not to post slights against teachers on social media sites. The principal has made it clear that legal action is not out of the question.
A librarian at McMaster is currently embroiled in a legal dispute with a publishing house that didn't care to be characterized as "second rate" in his blog posting. The case is becoming ever more complex going beyond the usual scope of slander and libel versus academic freedom to include "academic mobbing" which seems to be sophisticated combination of ostracism and bullying and legal harrassment.
More alarmingly, a woman in Montreal took a picture of a wall and posted it on instagram. The wall just happend to display a violent graffito caricturing a police commander with a bullet wound prominent on his forehead. Although the woman denys making the graffito -she says she only posted a picture of it- she's looking at criminal harassment charges.
And more recently, Newfoundland and Labrador MHA Gerry Rogers was thrown out of the House of Assembly because she was an unwitting member of the facebook group "Kathy Dunderdale Must Go!" Someone other than Ms. Rogers made what were taken to be death threats on the message board for the group. Ms. Rogers sole connection was that she was added to the group by another person.
Ms. Dunderdale has said "it is up to every MHA to monitor the comments posted on facebook groups to which they belong." She also says that the government understands how facebook works, but one must wonder if they do. I myself have started a several groups on facebook and it used to be that you asked friends to join. One day a couple years back I was horrified to see that people I thought I was inviting were in fact "being joined". Yeah,it's that easy!
So the lesson here is watch what people think you say, and be careful what you get accused of doing!
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