Extreme Mean: Ending Cyberabuse at Work, School, and Home

by Paula Todd

Overview

From one of Canada's foremost investigative writers, a groundbreaking exposé on the motives and machinations behind cyberabuse - tormenting, trolling, harassment, cyberbullying, stalking, and sexual extortion - and the toll it is taking on children, youth, and adults around the world.
 
It seems as if each week our news broadcasts, newspaper headlines, Twitter feeds, and Facebook timelines are dominated by stories of cyberbullying and other digital abuse. This isn't the playground teasing and name-calling of generations before the Internet. This new abuse's unique characteristics - anonymity, permanence, and viral audience - can relentlessly exacerbate the humiliation, pain, and danger of its victims.
 
Ugly rumours that once snaked through school hallways and around the office water cooler are now delivered at lightning speed to the world, while sexual extortion and revenge-porn sites target those who've shared intimate images or had them stolen by hackers. Cyberstalkers who target adults destroy reputations and careers. And the splendid connectivity of social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, also makes us vulnerable to "interpersonal terrorism," while apps that promise privacy and rapid deletion are ridden with loopholes.
 
With vivid reportage, Paula Todd goes deep into the world of "extreme mean," uncovering the people who use the Internet to undermine lives rather than improve them. Through exclusive personal stories of online abuse from around the world, including the suicide of Amanda Todd and the untold costs of Rebecca Black's experience as "the most hated girl on the Internet," as well as interviews with troll-tormentors, accidental abusers, victimized kids, and adults, Extreme Mean explores the often surprising roots of online abuse, challenges current academic thinking, and offers new ways of understanding the nasty and the nefarious who erode humanity and  threaten Internet freedom.
 
Provocative, astute and compelling, Extreme Mean is a shocking yet inspiring illustration of behaviour that affects all of us. It's a call-to-arms for change, and a search for ways to turn a moral panic into a moral possibility.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780771084041
Publisher:	McClelland & Stewart
Publication date:	05/21/2014
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

PAULA TODD is an investigative journalist, lawyer and the bestselling author of EXTREME MEAN: Trolls, Bullies and Predators Online, which reveals the real reasons adults, youth and kids torment, harass, stalk and sexually extort online, along with the solutions. She became the first journalist in Canada to break news in an e-book with Finding Karla: How I Tracked Down An Elusive Child Serial Killer and Discovered a Mother of Three. She spent more than a decade as a full-time reporter with the Toronto Star, and another decade-plus hosting news programs at CTV and TVO.  A frequent speaker and educator, she  is a broadcast and digital media professor, and the Chair of Digital Issues for Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, and holds an LL.B from Osgoode Hall Law School.​

Table of Contents

Prologue 1

1 Why Are We So "Horrible" to Each Other? 4

2 The Haunting of Amanda Todd 13

3 Cyberstalking a Good Samaritan 28

4 Rebecca's Black "Friday" 44

5 Kids Say the Most Despicable Things 63

6 Adults Say the Most Despicable Things, Too 76

7 Trolls Or Tormentors? 89

8 Jokes, Jabs, Or Just Plain Sick Online? 99

9 "What Kind of People Can Do That?" 108

10 Is Cyberbullying "Exaggerated"? 126

11 A Predator's Best Friend 154

12 Girls (And Boys) Gone Wild? 167

13 Celebrities To Sluts 181

14 Initial Influencers 195

15 The New Young Censors 206

16 Bully Nation 218

17 Whose Law And What Order? 230

18 Can We At Least Be Civil? 251

19 The Madding Crowd: How Online Bystanders Fuel Cyberabuse 263

20 The Mean Mosaic 275

21 "Top Three Ways To Protect Us Online?" 288

22 From Mean To Magnanimous: How To Use This Book 295

Acknowledgements 303

Glossary 306

Notes 312

Index 338

Editorial Reviews

"An essential eye-opening investigation of internet use, misuse, and abuse.... Investigative research with profound social, legal, and philosophical implications. Overwhelmingly persuasive. A book every parent—or anyone online—must read."—Hilary Weston Prize jury citation

From the Publisher