Police arrest 15-year-old girl accused of cyberbullying in Florida - Alix Kast

An unnamed 15-year old girl was arrested in St. Petersburg, Florida. She was charged with one count of tampering with a witness and three counts of aggravated stalking. She sent hundreds of texts to three other girls, most of them supposedly including death threats. They had apparently been friends, but had some kind of disagreement. On Monday, police interviewed the girl and told her to stop sending messages such as these, but she continued, and this led to the second charge. She definitely realized that she was emotionally hurting them and admitted that she sent a portion of the texts, but wouldn't confess to sending all of them. In another part of Florida  two girls were arrested in a similar case involving cyberbullying and the suicide of a twelve-year old girl.

This shows the negative side of our advanced technology. You can easily send many hurtful messages to someone within seconds. However, any messages you send are usually recorded  by the company/service you use and would be easily accessible to authorities, so it is easy to find proof of cyberbullying. Arresting her may seem extreme, but if she acted on these threats or drove one of the other girls to hurt themselves them it would become an extremely serious matter. That seems to have been the case involving the other young girl. I find it very upsetting that such a young person would end up being driven to harm themselves in such a way. Nowadays, bullying almost seems to be more frequent, but it could be that it's simply more publicized. We should be able to do something about it, but all too often cases like this seem to end in tragedy.  If bullying really is becoming more frequent, then what does that say about our society? Human nature along with that of other animals is to compete for survival, but when you don't have to compete for resources then it seems like an excessive trait. And bullying like this goes way beyond a normal definition of "competition".  Hopefully we can finally find a way to prevent bullying in the future. Maybe the threat of being arrested would cause less bullying to occur, but it could just motivate bullies to be more secretive and to find different ways to hurt others. 

http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/07/justice/florida-cyberbullying-arrest/index.html?hpt=us_c2