it has to stop

I was innocently eating my dinner this evening when a story came on about a young man named Tyler Clementi, a freshman at Rutgers. Tyler was 18, shy, a great musician who had dreams of playing in an elite orchestra.

All of those dreams died with Tyler a week ago.

You see, Tyler’s roommate installed a webcam in their room, controlled it from a friend’s room, and captured Tyler in a homosexual encounter. The roommate then opted to blast the video out to the world via Social Media. Tyler killed himself.

If you feel uncomfortable about the issue of homosexuality, consider the story of Megan Meier, who committed suicide because the mother of a high school peer created an account on MySpace, pretended to be a boy, made Megan think “he” was in love with her, and then began taunting her cruelly, telling her the world would be better without her.

As a business person, as a professional, I have become highly involved in Social Media, but there are shadows lurking in this world, and those shadows are gruesome. They are tragic. They are, in fact, abhorrent.

I’ve talked a lot about the issue of influence on this blog. Now is the time to test your influence. After discussing this issue with @MissusP, @Grit08, and @TomMoradpour this evening, we would like to create a “town hall” chat regarding safety in Social Media. At a minimum, we’d like to create a hash tag that would begin to trend to draw attention to these issues.

At a maximum, we would use our combined influence and brains to determine how to make these tragedies stop. Who better than us, those who preach Social Media best practices? We are in it. We are of it.

Let’s make it right.

Please comment below when you would be available for this chat and any names you’d want to recommend for the chat and/or hash tag. Perhaps an existing chat would be willing to lend us their spot since week days tend to be good for people. Remember, in terms of chat names and hashtags, we need to keep the names short so that people can respond and retweet.

Thank you for your help with this. The time is now.

Image by Mateusz Stachowski. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/Mattox

32 comments

  7. Wow-I had no idea this happened. How awful.

    Being gay myself, I know what it’s like to have cruelty thrown my way…to the point where it almost breaks you. You feel so alone and so hurt, it’s difficult to put into words.

    One of the chats which may be good for this topic is: @GenYChat

    RE: the hashtag…maybe #SMCSWU (Social Media Cruelty Stops With Us)…?

    Count me in on this chat Marjorie, and I’ll be Tweeting about this tomorrow as well.

    1. Thanks, Cristian.

      As a little person I have also had cruelty thrown my way – very different of course, but the sentiments that kind of cruelty creates is something that can hurt no matter what the reason.

      I like the acronym – think it might be a bit too long to catch on, but you’re on to something there.

      Thanks. ((hugs))

  8. I suppose it’s very politically incorrect to not be totally on board with this, but I believe those are very high-profile cases you mention and I also believe there are just not that many suicides being committed where social media is the root cause. Depression is easily the number one cause of suicide. I don’t have stats to back it up, but I tend to think that people who are depressed to the point of considering suicide are not really worried about their Facebook status. Still, I think this is a worthwhile effort, if only to bring attention to suicide as a whole and ways it can be prevented. Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death and not getting any better due to strained circumstances worldwide, so any and all discussions that result in curbing that number are worthwhile.

    1. It’s fine!

      They are high profile cases, but what worries me is that there might be dozens or hundreds of cases like this that we don’t hear about. To your point, suicide is a common cause of death in our society. How do we know what the final straw for those poor souls was? Maybe it was finding out via Social Media that they were a laughing stock at work. We have no way of knowing.

      Social Media is one thing we know for sure is a contributing factor, so let’s talk about that, and hopefully, hopefully, that will give us ways to help people who don’t use Social Media or who aren’t affected by it as well.

  9. Marjorie

    With all of the pros of social media and the pointing out of who is doing it wrong and who is doing it right, etc. there is one big topic that we do not hear too much about (at least I do not) and that is suicides from social media. We would be naive to think that the bullies would not take full advantage of these tools to publicly humiliate someone.

    I have a heavy heart when I see stories like these as I could never imagine the sadness for the families as they are filled with such grief and yet anger knowing the the last hours of their child’s life was filled with overwhelming distress over something posted online – that was an intentional act (to humiliate to gain some sort of coolness or self worth).

    As a mom I teach my son to be kind, mindful and respectful of others, to be polite and grateful. He is only 5 but he, through his own personality, is so sweet and he is giving and oh does he share (I had to pack extra snacks for his day camp so he could have some for his friends). Being an only child he does not live in the world of “mine,” nor does he poke fun at people or leave anyone out. He loves people and cares about them. He remembers things that are meaningful to people (that works in my favor cuz at 41, the warranty on the super duper memory has lapsed).

    I am on board to do what I can to make a difference. We all have times of grief, pain and feeling less of who we are and sometimes the covers over our heads would be better than facing it but then there is that voice that forces us to not succumb. When we lose that voice due to actions of someone else, the result is the deepest and darkest place. Together I think we can keep the voice alive.

    Thank you for taking the time to address this and bring a community together.

    1. Thanks, Suzanne.

      I know, it breaks my heart as well, not just for the people who die because of these incidents, but also because i don’t understand how people get to the point of being so cruel. Maybe at some point that roommate was just like your Andrew. Maybe he didn’t think that doing this was that wrong. I don’t know. Something happened there that was awful and now he has blood on his hands.

  10. Marjorie, I think that it is incredible that you are calling attention to this topic. I think it would be great to get some educators involved so that maybe they can help spread the message after the Town Hall. I’m it. If you are not going to use a pre-established chat that gives up their space for the topic, I would recommend checking out the tweetchat schedule at http://bit.ly/twchats to see if there is a blank space that makes sense to you. Would love to support and participate, keep me in the loop. (Btw…remember what I said about how you are a thought leader 😉 that’s what this looks like to me, glad you are leading the charge)

  11. Thank you for taking a step towards how can we solve this instead of stopping at isn’t this tragic. Please count me in. I would love a format other than Twitter if possible, but if that’s what it is I’m still in.

  12. Count me in!

    Thank you for organizing this effort. What’s incredibly heartbreaking is that this social media can be used to help people who feel that they can’t turn to anyone they know. Yet time after time, those in need get the opposite message.

    There was a similar case on Digg this summer where a young man wrote that he was considering suicide and instead of getting him help, he was taunted into killing himself.

    Hopefully, this group can be like the signs on the Tappan Zee Bridge (over the Hudson River in NY) that try to persuade potential jumpers not to. There are even phones along the bridge.

    1. Hi Heidi,

      I hadn’t heard about that Digg story. And I’m kind of glad I didn’t know about it all this time. How gut wretching. Ugh.

      Your analogy is good. If we could be a sign or a fence telling people they don’t have to take that one final, awful step, we’d all have done a great thing.

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