NROP: Going viral – the double-edged sword of social media.

Has your content ever gone viral?

Mine has not. Why would it? There is so much better content out there like the #BottleCapCallenge, a photo of a good looking guy working at Target, or a guy asking for $10 to make a potato salad (and receiving over $50,000).

Have you ever been bullied?

Who has not? (Seriously, tell me.) Throughout my life I have been bullied for a variety of reasons.

Google defines bullying as an act “seek to harm, intimidate, or coerce (someone perceived as vulnerable)”. Whenever we think of bullying, we imagine a kid curled up in a corner refusing to go to school, or a child stuffed into a locker. However, if you think of the meaning of the word, it is not difficult to realize that bullying is something that each one of us is prone to encounter on any given day as an adult as well.

My first memory of getting bullied is probably from my first year of school. My parents were not always around and I had no sense of fashion, which meant that I would put on the first thing I saw in my drawers. My grandmother was of no use in that department, either. She thought that anything that was clean and had no holes was safe for school. There were plenty of outfits that were out of style. (I have always been behind or ahead of my time…) Other kids did not approve of some of my clothes and thought it would be amusing to make fun of me.

Sometimes, in dire situations, my parents would cut my hair. My dad was the worst. While he was the one who made mistakes, it was I that had to live with his bad decisions. It got me into plenty of trouble with the “cool” kids. I was never the biggest kid to be able to protect myself, but I always stood up for myself, and I believe that paid off. There is no doubt in my mind that people talked and gossiped about me (and still do), but it rarely got back to me. If it has no impact on me, I do not care about it. People do not waste time on something that does not produce expected results. They can point fingers and laugh, but if you do not react, they will go away.

Have you heard about 8-year-old kids committing suicide due to bullying? I think it is a rather recent phenomenon encouraged by social media. Are kids different today than they were 20+ years ago? is one of my first posts that expounds on that topic.

A few months ago (Where did all the time go?), we talked about an Autistic boy who was given a private study room in his school. He was supposedly mistreated and so his mother took it to social media to post an embarrassing photo of him in a school bathroom that had been customized to fit his needs. You know what they say…

Whatever happens on the Internet stays on the Internet.

If a certain mother from Australia read my posts, she would have thought twice about posting all sorts of photos and videos of her son. She went viral when she published a video of her 9-year-old son crying and asking for a knife to end his life after being bullied at school. During the video, which is minutes long, he asks to be killed because the bullying is too much. What message does that video send? To me, it sounds like the mother is making a spectacle out of him instead of comforting her son and talking to him. It must be horrifying to hear your kid talk about committing suicide. Is recording them the first thing that pops into your mind?

The kid was born with dwarfism and the above-mentioned viral video was not his first public appearance. Aside from struggling with achondroplasia, he is also of Aboriginal Australian origin, which supposedly added to the bullying the boy had undergone.

The boy and his mom first went viral when she posted a video of him screaming “Stop looking at me” (2:11). It is filmed by the mother and shows the kid in a shopping cart, looking behind her. During the interview, the mother said that people walking behind them were pointing at looking at him. Where do you expect people to look when they are walking behind you and in the same direction as you? Yes, people’s eyes are always drawn towards things that are different and stand out.

As an adult, I still struggle with acting around people with various disabilities. It is not because I discriminate against them. It is because I simply am not sure how to behave. If you stare (normally), then you are a bad person because you are surely staring with privilege and pity. But when you avert your eyes, that is not good, either. Do you really think they are so ugly that you cannot bare looking at them? So which one is it? I try to make it as natural as possible. However, I imagine, if you are different-looking, it is not hard for you to pick up on abnormal looks. Sometimes they might just be benign…

What happened after the recent video? Various social media accounts of the boy and his mom are said to have been deleted. It makes me wonder why. Did the boy realize what happened and got upset that his mother turned him into another meme?

There is a conspiracy theory going on, which claims that the boy is 18+ years old. Is it possible that the accounts have been deleted to try and delete the evidence of that scam? That is still to be seen.

Before that happened, celebrities raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for this boy so he could fly to the US and go to Disneyland. The GoFundMe page for Quaden can be found –> here <–. Aside from the gathered money and supportive messages/videos from people like Cardi B and Hugh Jackman, the boy also received an invitation to walk out with the National Rugby League’s Indigenous All Stars, which was his dream.

Whether he is 9 or 19, is yet to be uncovered. If he is an adult and they are scamming people, then I hope they get the punishment they deserve. However, I will assume (for now) that everything in the story is true.

There are two things that stood out to me as I read all those articles and watched the videos. First of all, I wish we put more effort into educating our own kids on how to handle bullying instead of asking the Internet to deal with it. Second of all, what makes this particular boy so special? How do you think all the other kids feel who receive absolutely nothing for their suffering?

If you struggle with what other people say, take a look at one of my posts entitled “How to deal with harsh words“. Please pass it along to anyone else, who you think might benefit from my suggestions.

Do you witness adult bullying?

How did you/do you deal with bullying?

Stay golden,

.

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