by Sarah Sanny

Created on: July 30, 2008

There is a sad trend going on with the behavior of young people on the internet these days. I remembering seeing on TV about one girl that committed suicide because of the degree of bullying she went through from someone on MySpace. It took them a year after her death to be able to even try to press charges against the person responsible. That young girl's story shows one other thing, besides the increase in internet bullying. It was not another teenager doing the bullying, but one of her classmates' mothers! So it is apparently not just teenagers these days but also their parents who feel the need to degrade the youth of our society.

I've also noticed an increase in irresponsible and irrational behavior on an online forum that I have been a part of for five years now. One of the discussion forums, the General Discussion or GD for short, has gotten to be such a haven for people looking to bully or elicit any kind of sexual cyber activities. The online community does have a Terms of Service (TOS) policy, and an age limit, but as I'm sure everyone knows, it is so easy to get around that age limit by saying you're the proper age when you sign up. The GD used to be a good place for a fair debate, years ago when I started. Now all that is there is people looking to make fun of other people, or if they start a debate, it ends up being highly political or just complete crap about the person ranting against some group.

I was in the GD one morning, and noticed a discussion thread about whether gays should be allowed to adopt or not. Now, I'm all for gay rights, so I clicked on it, hoping it would be one that was for them adopting. It was not. This young girl, who admitted she was only 12 (the TOS states you must be 13 to join), was ranting and raving about how having homosexual parents would make you homosexual as well. Many of us argued against her, as I have friends in such a household who are straight. It was ridiculous some of the arguments this girl came up with. One of them was that just by living with a homosexual person you could get AIDS or become gay, despite what we all kept pointing out from medical journals about AIDS. She refused to see reason, and claimed that God had told her it was her job in life to eradicate all gays and lesbians from the world. So we told her to prove it and she told us how God had just told her we were all gay, even though many of us are married to the opposite sex and have children (and we had told her this too).

Other members in the GD enjoy posting pictures or topics that are blatant violations of the TOS, but most of the people in the GD will not report them because they enjoy making fun of people. It was quite a regular occurrence to see discussion threads about who got what over the weekend in the way of sexual favors, or just people looking to hook up online for some cybering.

It's really sad how low the forum has fallen over the last several years. I miss the days when you could go into the GD and actually have a decent conversation without someone trying to hack you or solicit things from you. I had one girl, while I was playing a game on the website, try multiple times to get me to "experiment" with her. She finally stopped and apologized after I told her that I am in fact married (and straight).

I wish I could go back to those good old days, years ago, when everyone was at least somewhat respectful. Nowadays all I see in the GD is little kids with no sense of morality or decency running around trying to act all cool and tough, even though they have no idea what they are talking about, or the impact they have on their fellow youth as well as the world around them.

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