Andrew Potts: I was cyberbullied as a teen and know why social media changes are vital
I was a 14 year old high school student when the relentless cyber bullying began, driving me to the brink without anyone to turn to, writes Andrew Potts.
The telltale ping of a new email’s arrival sounded through the speakers of my home computer.
It’s late at night on a weekday in April 2002 and I’ve received an email from an account bearing the ominous sobriquet “The bringer of despair”.
The email’s text spells out in brutal, uncompromising detail that all of my classmates hated me and wanted nothing to do with me.
Similar emails arrived nightly thereafter, tearing apart my world and leaving me feeling isolated, alone and worried.
For fear of embarrassment, I felt I couldn’t turn to my parents for help or advice and, not knowing who I could trust, I kept my own counsel.
I slept little, ruminating and endlessly replacing the messages from the emails in my head and wondering just how much my classmates all hated me.
Given there was plenty who picked on me and hurled a slew of homophobic invective, it didn’t exactly seem out of the question.
Each day I went to school and felt utterly alone and terrified among my hundreds of classmates.
I was 14 years old.
It eventually turned out that the person behind this anonymous email was a classmate who thought cyber-bullying was the easiest way to tell me he didn’t want to be friends anymore.
I was devastated but thankfully made new friends, who I remain close with today, many decades later.
I’ve long since forgiven the sender and told my family what happened but I’ve never forgotten the pain, fear and confusion it caused.
Cyber-bullying was rife online in the early years of the internet, long before the rise of social media.
Back then, the methods were cruder but it existed and it facilitated the wanton cruelty of teenagers.
From chatrooms to MSN Messenger and email, there were new ways for people looking to cause pain and trouble to directly target their victims.
What made this different from the violence and casual name-calling which these thugs employed previously was the ability to be anonymous or at the slight remove of being behind a screen.
Thankfully I was an adult and finishing my university studies by the time social media first made a serious dent in Australia but it’s not like this kind of behaviour is isolated to children.
Even in recent years, adults who surely should know better have delighted in unleashing their nasty, impotent bile, simply for covering a topic they felt strongly about in my professional capacity.
Clearly the kind of behaviour to feel proud of.
I can deal with this kind of shameful and unacceptable behaviour today but kids shouldn’t have to.
The federal government’s under-16s social media ban comes into effect next week, with online giants such as Facebook beginning the shutdown of accounts which fall afoul of this in the coming days.
Affected platforms include Meta’s Facebook, Instagram and Threads, X (formerly Twitter), Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok, and YouTube.
This is a world-leading step by the federal government and is set to be followed by other countries around the world.
It’s been clear for some time that something different needed to be done, with rising instances of cyber-bullying and radicalisation of young people.
The federal government argues it will prevent impressionable young people from accessing material which will harm them.
How successful it will be remains to be seen.
There are plenty of good arguments against it, such as the fears it will cut vulnerable teenagers off from their online support networks, as well as from their basic forms of entertainment.
And there is a logic to this.
Those affected were all born after 2009 and have never known a world without social media, pervasive screens and the way they experience the world is very different from those who came before, even those of us for whom the internet arrived in our school years.
It is inevitable that workarounds of sorts will be developed which will allow those willing to put the effort in to remain online and unencumbered in accessing their desired material.
Industrious teenagers have always found a way to circumvent technological roadblocks in their way, even back in the 1990s and early 2000s.
It’s worth withholding judgement to see how it will work in practice and what impact it has.
There is only so much which can be done to protect kids from what is online from a governmental role.
Parents must also play their part, setting an example and ensuring their children do the right thing.
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