It could happen to you

James (not his real name) has two Facebook profiles. One has existed for over a year and the other was created just weeks ago. Recently, James, through his first profile, blasted a message and a status update saying that the second profile isn’t his and asked those who have accepted the friend request from the other James to delete the connection and those who haven’t, to ignore the request.

The fake profile still exists, but there is no activity on it. If James wasn’t made aware of this online impersonation, it could’ve turned into an ugly instance of cyberbullying, defined on www.cyberbullying.org as “the use of information and communication technologies to support deliberate, repeated and hostile behavior by an individual or group that is intended to harm others.”

Cyber bullies are getting smart. Who knows what Fake James might have done if he wasn’t caught by Real James early on? We’ve all heard horror stories involving people whose reputations are tainted because of meticulously fabricated lies spread on the Internet through emails, social networks, blogs, messaging boards and chatrooms. The World Wide Web is still a lawless place and cybercrimes are rarely solved. All we can do is be vigilant—google yourself once in a while to see if suspicious results will come up—and be careful in posting details about yourself because anything you say and/or do can be held against you.

Parents, in particular, should educate themselves on everything there is to know to protect their kids from online attacks and also what to do if their kid is the attacker. The important thing to realize here is that the culprit is almost always someone your child knows (and maybe even trust). Cyber bullies are usually savvy in maintaining their anonymity, as opposed to the playground and schoolyard types, who bully for the sake of asserting their superiority over younger or weaker kids. The online kind is really to ruin good names, or worse, lives. They will insult, threaten, harass, impersonate (remember James?) and humiliate. Sadly, this, together with its subsets, cyberstalking and cyberharassment, is beginning to be a trend.

And you have to know that James is a married man in his thirties with three kids. So yes, cyber bullies can target anyone. The next victim could be you. –Ed Biado, Manila Standard Today