The Media Literacy Council (MLC) was formed in 2012 with the aim to promote cyber wellness by educating the public on how to consume, create and share content on the internet safely and responsibly. While that noble mission — trying to preserve morality in the wild wild web — is quite impossible, bless the council for at least trying.
This attempt, however, is not exactly one what one would describe as accurate. In a Facebook post yesterday, MLC taught parents how to detect the traits of cyberbullies in their children. The thing is, these “symptoms” are laughably too generic to be considered manifestations of a cruel individual who harasses others online.
Switching tabs? Laughing out loud? Being upset if the computer privileges are taken away? These idiosyncrasies apply to pretty much anyone who uses the internet regularly and saying that these are signs of a cyberbully is erroneous. Simultaneously ironic and appropriate too, considering that MLC wants people to exercise critical thinking when evaluating content on the internet.
If the objective was to get people to question what they consume online, MLC did pretty well, we suppose.
With the likes of high-ranking executives from Facebook and Google as well as multiple university professors as members of MLC, it is pretty surprising that such a simplistic overview of cyberbullies was allowed to be published.
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