Like many other kids, my older son continued to wet the bed well into his teen years.  On occasion his brothers and sisters would tease him about it.  I would tell them to stop and life moved on.  When his siblings began teasing him about it while at school and on the bus, this problem of sibling rivalry became something more destructive – character assassination.  Character assassination by siblings is an increasingly dangerous problem online.  Siblings are more dangerous than most for the following reasons:

1. They have an incredible amount of access to the person they are targeting.

2. That access gives what they are saying/doing credibility to others. 

3.  Dangerous behavior may be ignored as just sibling rivalry while the victim of the character assassination may be permanently damaged.  Does this sound a bit over the top?  Am I blowing this out of proportion?

Take a look at this video posted on youtube by one brother who videotaped his other brother when he knew he was going to be mad. 

That video was viewed (at the time of this writing) 35 million times.  That young man was just completely humiliated in front of 35 million people in the world, and counting.  Thanks to his brother also posting his name and other personal information online that video won’t just haunt him now, it will haunt him forever. 

More and more, college admissions teams and hiring managers are googling people to find out more about them prior to making major, life changing decisions on their behalf.  If you are the manager of a professional business how do you think this video is going to influence you?  In the negatives column you will write – serious anger management issues etc; and move onto the next candidate. 

Of course that will only matter if he even makes it out of his teen years.  The thing about videos such as this is that they end up being the beginning of the end.  The kids at school see the video.  Maybe he had friends and a girlfriend, but now that he is the butt of all jokes it isn’t as cool to be around him.  Plus the parents that saw this video may worry he is a bad influence and they don’t want someone with anger issues like him to be around their kids so they limit their interaction.  Then…. Who knows.  Maybe in a teenager’s impulsive way he decides to end his life. 

There are two messages that you, as parents, need to get from this video. 

One – if your child becomes the victim of extreme character assassination, such as this one has, you need to take it seriously.  Everything is magnified emotionally when we are teenagers.  It may be wise to seek professional help for your child, just to be safe.

Two – It is imperative that you, as parents, protect your children from this type of attack.  You can do this by setting up ground rules and monitoring the data that your children are allowed to upload to the Internet. Sometimes making strict rules is tough, but it's always better than being sorry you didn't. 

Regards,

Heather H. Sams
Planet Ocean

If life were fair, Facebook would post a privacy warning that says something like:

Your online whereabouts and everything you post
are known and can be revealed and held against you
in a court of law.

In other words, who you friend, the pics you post, the time you spend playing Farmville or World at War is being logged and can be used to verify your stories, or not. So, if you've said you were somewhere doing something with somebody, but your Web or smartphone activity shows otherwise, your lie will be exposed.

"Duh!" you say? Well, perhaps not-so-duh. The fact is that plenty of people seem to think 'there's no way for them to find out.' Think again. Everything you're doing online is being tracked. Everything you or your "friends" upload stays there forever! Your smartphone is registering your physical location and logging your activity. Sites like Facebook keep track of what you are doing, with whom and when. When you turn on your phone or log into your social networking site, you are leaving behind a trail that is poised to reveal the truth about where you were, what you were doing, and who you were doing it with at any specific time.

Divorce attorneys are giddy over these facts. A recent AP article revealed some of the "goofs" they've encountered while handling divorce cases such as:

• Husband goes on Match.com and declares his single, childless status while seeking primary custody of said nonexistent children.
• Husband denies anger management issues but posts on Facebook in his "write something about yourself" section: "If you have the balls to get in my face, I'll kick your ass into submission."
• Father seeks custody of the kids, claiming (among other things) that his ex-wife never attends the events of their young ones. Subpoenaed evidence from the gaming site World of Warcraft tracks her there with her boyfriend at the precise time she was supposed to be out with the children. Mom loves Facebook's Farmville, too, at all the wrong times.
• Mom denies in court that she smokes marijuana but posts partying, pot-smoking photos of herself on Facebook.

It is now standard operation procedure for an attorney to scan your Facebook page looking for collaborating evidence or to expose story inconsistencies and outright deceit. The message is that privacy matters. Not only should you avoid posting anything that you wouldn't want a judge to see or know about, you must also master the privacy settings or else forego having a Facebook (or MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) membership altogether.

In other words, if you mindlessly engage in risky privacy behavior and neglect to take sensible privacy precautions, then there's an attorney somewhere that's giddy over how easy it'll be to prosecute or fleece you when the opportunity arrives.