Aoife Dooley abused online after her article appeared in Junior Cert paper!

hatrickpatrick wrote: »

Am I in the minority when I say that trolling by random strangers I've never and will never meet has just never phased me online? It's one thing to be cyberbullied by people you know in real life because that usually has horrible real-life consequences which extend after one puts down the phone or laptop - I'd imagine very few people who are cyberbullied by people they know in real life are not also bullied in person by those same people. But threatening, abusive or trolling messages from random strangers? Honestly it always just made me laugh.

I'm not excusing douchebags for being douchebags, I just find it strange that the separation between screen persona and physical persona has apparently shrunk to non-existent. In my life, there's Hatrickpatrick and there's Paddy, and someone sending Hatrickpatrick sh!t over the internet doesn't hurt Paddy emotionally in real life. Now, Paddy has all of the main social networks, and of those, his Twitter is publicly available while his Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram etc are "real-life friends only" - if a real life friend was to start being a piece of sh!t on any of these platforms, that'd probably upset Paddy a lot, and has in the past. If a random stranger starts being a piece of sh!t to hatrickpatrick (or to Paddy on his Twitter account), Paddy just reads the messages and either closes them or if appropriate, tries to conjure an amusing rebuttal one-liner. If some stranger makes a threat against Paddy or hatrickpatrick on any of these platforms, his reaction is just "Good luck finding out where I live, and even if you do, my dog isn't nearly as cute as she looks if you piss her off, good luck attacking me with several dozen kilos of labrador chewing on your ass"

My point is, am I in the minority in taking this view? I regard the concept of 'cyberbullying' as bullying by real-life contacts who also make one's life a misery in the physical realm (for example, school or college people starting rumours or whatever which results in social isolation or embarrassment in person, in the physical world). But I literally don't understand how anyone can be truly upset by the ramblings of random rabble rousers on the internet - surely if you don't know someone in real life and you've never met them, you have no real emotional connection to that person or desire to be liked by them? The poster directly above my post at the time of writing this is the user Odyssey06. I do not know this individual in real life, only as someone who posts on AH. If the next post from Odyssey06 were to say something like "hatrickpatrick is a fat, creepy little bollocks and I'm going to go to his house and kick the sh!te out of him", I'd just be like "...ok then? Good luck finding me sir/madam, and I may be a little rotund but I'm stronger than I look "

It's in that context that I tend to be dismissive of this stuff. When did we start taking words written by random strangers we'll never meet as something to be emotionally invested in? There are seven billion people on this planet and I'll probably never meet more than a few hundred or thousand of them at best. If one of the few hundred of them I know and like were to threaten violence against me, that'd upset me and it might scare me. If one of the other 6.99 billion of them that I don't know threatens violence against me, they're just... Irrelevant strangers. Move message to spam folder and move on.

Look, I'm not defending the behaviour or suggesting that I have no sympathy for those who are actually emotionally hurt by the writings of strangers, I'm empathetic towards it insofar as I can be, I just don't understand it. They're strangers. You'll never meet. Who cares what brain farts they fire in your direction? You can't smell farts over the internet, like.