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Health & Fitness

A Plea For Help

Addressing the issues of cyber bullying.

It’s been less than two years since 19-year-old Tyler Clementi took his own life after his roommate broadcasted a homosexual affair to the Internet. As if nobody has learned a lesson, this horrible act of cyber bullying continues to linger on, somehow passing all of the measures taken by websites to prevent this horrible epidemic.

Being 16 and stupid, I tend to spend a lot of time on Facebook. I really wish I hadn't made an account, because I've wasted not only the past 4 years on it, but also an excess amount of necessary brain cells. Something I constantly see throughout my newsfeed is the activity of teens around my age submitting pictures of themselves to groups such as "Most Beautiful Teen" and "Gorgeous Teenagers". These groups encourage kids to submit self-portraits, which can then be voted on, having the picture with the highest amount of votes coming out on top. 

As if this does not seem degrading enough, as you could imagine, most members of the pages don't bite their tongues. Being behind a computer screen hundreds of miles away, the other members don't hold back. Often you'll find a picture with nothing but hate speech in the comments. Just for the record, I'm not one of those 'everybody wins' people, but I'm almost sure that this falls into the 'Cyber Bullying' category. 

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Not everybody I know sees eye-to-eye on this, and some submit pictures anyway, just out of the curiosity that lies naturally in humans. A kid who we'll call 'Andy' happened to post a picture of himself the other day, probably hoping to receive positive feedback. Instead, he got responses such as "Kill yourself, f----t" and others like "you're an ugly [POS]". 

Thinking myself to be a regular Superman I intervened, trying to teach some immature little snot noses a lesson. Instead, they began to turn on me, calling me a "f----t". I reported the whole post to Facebook in hopes of it being removed and contrary to what I expected, it wasn't removed.

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The same night, there was another post, but this time it was someone with a higher self-esteem; We'll call this girl 'Alena'.  You see, Alena posted a picture of herself, knowing that she was overweight and would probably receive even more hate speech. As the comments began pouring in, the only one that made me slightly smile was one posted by Alena in regards to a degrading comment. As many began insulting her based on her weight, she did nothing but reply, "Thanks :)" - showing herself to be the bigger person. 

A regular of the group, someone posted a comment which reads: “You enter a contest and expect to be judged by whatever "beauty" you think you have, yet you post a photo in which I can't even see your [expletive deleted] face? Get the [expletive deleted] out. You're disqualified.”

Another posted: “Okay. You're a stupid [expletive deleted] for posting this.”

I guess this isn’t enough for Facebook to remove. I don’t know why, but it certainly isn’t right to continue allowing the creation of these groups. 

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