When it comes to accessing the correct audience and maintaining a trusted online reputation, building a brand online offers considerable benefits for business owners and even individuals. However, the advantages of online visibility are not without their drawbacks. The more they are exposed to the public eye, they grow more vulnerable to risks that only exist on the internet, such as cyberbullying. Cyberbullying is commonly misunderstood to be solely the domain of youngsters on the internet. The truth is that people of all ages utilize cyberbullying tactics for a variety of reasons. Trolls and bullies have become practically difficult to avoid due to the rise of social media, and the fact that no one seems to have a right to privacy adds to the problem. Cyberbullying has progressed beyond petty comments to the point where victims are routinely “doxxed” or having private information dug up and published online for all to see. All of this falls under the umbrella of freedom of speech, which the internet champions, even if it means that private facts about a person’s life might remain online indefinitely.
To make matters worse, social media and internet behemoths have no system in place to monitor or minimize cyberbullying, leaving everyone vulnerable to destructive attacks on their reputation. Because search engines crawl web pages, anything intended to cause harm can be accessed by anybody, and the consequences of cyberbullying can linger for years. While it’s easy to dismiss cyberbullying as a minor issue, the truth is that what happens online can have a severe impact on people’s lives and businesses.
How Do You Define Cyberbullying?
Cyberbullying refers to any form of bullying that occurs online. Harming, harassing, threatening, and shaming a person or a brand is all part of it. Bullies use social media, messaging apps, chat rooms, email, and website comments to carry out their attacks. Cyberbullying can take place either directly online or as a continuation of bullying that has occurred offline. Cyberbullying, regardless of how it begins, is becoming increasingly widespread. Cyberbullying may appear limited to children on social media to those who have never experienced it. Yet, it affects people of all ages—in many circumstances, cyberbullying affects the person being bullied and their family, friends, and connections. Cyberbullying can take many forms, including spreading false stories, publishing humiliating images or videos, and creating bogus profiles and websites that can cause the victim grief. Photomontages and viral memes are less typical forms of cyberbullying that wreak just as much harm. Because of how quickly these attacks spread online, they have the potential to cause significant damage. Because the internet is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it is feasible to launch attacks at any time, from any location, and on any platform. While the internet and social media can promote free speech, they can also spread slander, defamatory content, and hate speech. Outside of social media, the way search engines monitor, and rank information nearly guarantees that cyberbullying will have a long-term impact on those victimized. Attackers can now more successfully smear someone’s name in the mud than ever before. Regrettably, for the victims, repairing the damage created by cyberbullying is becoming more difficult by the day.
The Right to Privacy
Individuals have limited to no online privacy rights in today’s world. Any facts or personal details about a person’s life can go viral if shared with the wrong individuals. The public exposure of PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel in 2007 is a prominent example of this. Thiel was outed as gay in a story published by the now-defunct publication Gawker, which was private information that he never divulged on his own. Gawker’s post was a deliberate attempt to persuade Thiel to reveal his sexual orientation to the rest of the world, which should have been his choice. There was nothing that could be done to prevent that story from being published, and the fact that people are still talking about it demonstrates the pervasiveness of cyberbullying. Gawker was a website that thrived on cyberbullying, which eventually led to its demise. After leaking a sex tape featuring Hulk Hogan, the firm was sued in 2013. Thiel bankrolled the litigation and provided the resources needed to prevail, likely prompted by his personal experience. After all was said and done, the court ordered Gawker to pay Hogan hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. Nobody Speak: The Trials of the Free Press, a Netflix documentary, has covered the entire affair. Gawker was compelled to close down and file for bankruptcy as a result of the court’s decision. Is this to say that the publication got its just desserts? No, not at all.
Should There Be a Right to Be Forgotten?
Gawker’s coverage of Peter Thiel will live on in the pages of the internet in perpetuity. Thiel may have played a role in the publication’s demise, but the Gawker narrative isn’t going away anytime soon. Because of the internet, the Gawker affair will live on in Thiel’s legacy. The story’s content continues to score high in Google’s search results, and it’s mentioned in the first paragraph of his Wikipedia article. Because no one has the right to be forgotten online, cyberbullying tactics can haunt the victims of attacks for a long time. A defamatory tale or social media post that goes viral or is picked up by high-profile newspapers will not go away on its own. Any small business owner or prominent figure is in the same boat. You don’t have to be as famous as Hulk Hogan to target someone with a platform. Stories like this occur daily to ordinary people, bringing distress at the time of occurrence and for the remainder of the person’s life.
The Internet Is Not a Forgetting Place We are losing control of any right to privacy due to the nature of social media and the internet in general. It’s as simple as posting a Tweet to permanently harm someone’s reputation, rendering both public figures and ordinary people exposed to cyberbullying assaults. While Gawker had a platform that allowed it to criticize people like Thiel easily, the internet provides everyone with the same level of access to a large audience. Nothing can stop someone from creating a website tomorrow, publishing rumors or private information, and ranking it on Google using basic search engine optimization (SEO) strategies. Similarly, anyone who understands how news spreads on the internet may plan a social media cyberbullying campaign. Whether the attacks are carried out through social media or traditional website postings, the attacks have the same long-term impact. The internet never forgets, and computer behemoths have done nothing to ease or lessen the negative consequences of cyberbullying on victims. The problem, if anything, is becoming worse. There is, however, a silver lining. When people search for Peter Thiel on Google, the Gawker story will undoubtedly come up, but the results will also reveal that Thiel is still thriving in the corporate sector. His public outing would live on in his memory forever, yet it did not spell the end of his career. Due to the strength of his reputation, Thiel remains a prominent and essential businessman. The Gawker versus Thiel affair serves as a case study in online reputation management and highlights the impacts of cyberbullying. People and corporations can endure the most damaging attacks by developing a bully-proof brand. Cyberbullying can be highly detrimental to businesses, but the strength of a well-known brand can help them weather the storm.