How would you deal with an internet bully

[ismnotwasm]

27. Interesting question

I have a friend who is being bullied over Twitter and Facebook. The one harassing her has gone so far as to include my friends children in some vile posts. She's done a number of things to combat it, changed privacy settings, started a new account, stopped participating--tried to ignore the situation, notified Twitter about on-line abuse etc. contacted blogs that keeps track of that kind of thing-- nothing worked. (I think she might have even called the police at one time) Then she went on the offensive and called out the person publicly...and got her FB and Twitter accounts temporarily suspended.

And yes, her harasser claims to be a victim.

What slowly happened, or is slowly happening I should say, is the harasser (who should have been booted off social media as far as I'm concerned) began to lose "support" as the continual attacks became clearer in nature--the rantings and lies of a self-absorbed and clearly disturbed person. I tend to stay far away from that type of situation, but my friend deserved and needed support, so I broke my personal rule about staying away from Internet drama. Once a borderline/histrionic type gets obsessed, it's virtually impossible to shake them off.

The way I see it you can end up with only two things to do, if appeals to authority fail, one is ignore them (hard to do in certain circumstances) the other is call them on it. If the second choice is taken, remembering that anyone who engages in that type of behavior thrives on attention, and negative attention is better than no attention. So discretion, discretion, discretion when calling out an Internet bully.