Exmouth hit by cyber bullying on new social networking site Formspring!

My advice to my friends who are using this website was "if you don't like it, ignore it. Because if you don't answer the questions they don't come up on the page so no one else can read them, which is good as it saves them humiliation. If it continue's delete the site all together." i haven't made a formspring because it doesn't appeal to me and i feel it is just asking for trouble. But even though i have been told that they are victims of cyber bullying, and that they are really hurt by some of the comments. They continue to use this site. So there is nothing i can say or do to stop this and the only advice i can give is to not let it bother them. It's hard, but sometimes you have to just bite the bullet and let other people do what they want. If it was up to me, i wouldn't have this website running, and i know people agree with me. But if you shut one site down you might as well shut them all down. You can't win, so there is no point in fighting.

This story's a real eye-opener Louisa and interesting to read about - teenagers are often quicker to know about the popular sites before their parents or teachers etc., and so it's hard to know how to protect teens from cyberbullying. I've just had a look at the website itself and note that it ends in .me not .com or .co.uk, and the thing that jumps out instantly is that to join you only have to confirm you're over 13 years old. So no doubt there are many young teens using this site. Perhaps the best plan is that if you read something nasty about one of your friends, you don't tell them or others, and if you read something about yourself, just take the decision not to put yourself through the agony of looking - log out and don't use the site. When I was a teen, in the mid 90s, all we had as a means of communicating after school hours was our parents' landlines - there was no email, no mobiles, no social media etc., but I'm sure that there were occasions when friends would talk about each other behind backs etc. The danger with modern social media is that it's easier to find out what people are saying about you - so the healthy option is not to look and not to take notice of what people say. But how do you convey that to a teenage girl or boy whose confidence is fragile and who doesn't have the life experience to know what's worth knowing about yourself etc? Thanks for the heads-up though Louisa - fascinating and worrying. We need a way to really help teens work their way through this new pressure. Do you have any suggestions?