By: Taylor Millis [Yearbook Excutieve Editor] @tinytmills
Susie gets home from school and checks her phone. She sees she has three texts from her friends and a Twitter notification. She quickly opens her text messages and is confused by what her friends are frantically talking about. Someone has made a fake account on Twitter and is using it to bash students at her school. She remembers the Twitter notification and quickly checks her profile. This fake account tweeted something bad about her and now everyone can see it. She is horrified and begins to cry.
Although Susie is not a real girl here at MHS, this scenario is one that relates to some of the students at Marion, and any other high school for that matter. This week is no different than any other in the cyber world. Kids are using the internet and social networking to communicate with others and a good portion of it is bullying. This week some students were victims to one of these fake Twitter accounts about MHS.
The particular account in the spotlight is called “sluts of Marion”. This account targeted multiple students at the high school and talked about the personal lives, whether it was the truth or a lie, of these students. This account ended its bullying rampage with a tweet saying, “Alright guys I’m done.. just wanted to have a little fun:* peace.” The creator of this account may have thought that publicly humiliating others is all fun and games, but they are sadly mistaken. According to arcofhopeforchildren.org “Bully victims are 2-9 times more likely to consider suicide (Yale University study).” If harassing others online is fun for the accounts creator, he/she may need to reevaluate their idea of the word fun.
Consider this, what if one of the students targeted was already depressed and unhappy with themselves? Maybe that one tweet that was posted online for the school, the community and the world to see, pushed them to the brink and they decided that the only way to end the pain was to end their life. Beyond just that, no one needs to bring others down just to “have a little fun”. There is no way that the creator of the account could not find anything better and more fun to do with their time. This is just another case of malicious bullying and quite frankly it’s disgusting.
