‘Beating the Workplace Bully’

My interest in strategies to combat bullying — from being a survivor in childhood — led me to Beating the Workplace Bully by Lynne Curry (AMACOM Books, Jan. 13, 2016).

Drawing upon her experience as a workplace coach as well as past experience as a target, Curry identifies seven workplace bully types, their motivations and mindset. She also addresses strategies for dealing with each bully type.

The dynamics between bully and target that are addressed in this book include supervisor to subordinate, subordinate to supervisor and bullying between workplace colleagues.

Lisa Khoury’s ‘Internet drubbing’: comment platform created hostile environment

Lisa Khoury

At PBS: MediaShift, Dan Reimold shares six lessons from the “Internet drubbing” of college journalism student Lisa Khoury. In February 2012, Khoury authored a counterpoint opinion opposing tattoos for The Spectrum student newspaper.

Khoury’s commentary appeared in print adjacent to the companion “pro” piece but was posted by itself online.

A year later, Khoury and Spectrum editor-in-chief Matthew Parrino said they learned six lessons from “the viral hate they faced and the steps they took to cope with and counter it.”

Troll on Craigslist: Confident Staffing CEO offers wonderful response

At Craigslist Medford, the CEO of Confident Staffing offers a wonderful response to online criticism. “I am sincerely sorry that your impression of our company was not positive,” it reads in part.“I always welcome feedback about our company and staff, so please do feel free to reply to this posting about your experience.” And its author is identified.

The email-scramble feature of Craigslist makes it easy to “troll,” to leave comments with anonymity. I’m unfamiliar with the complaints made by this individual (I can’t rule out their validity) but am impressed by the dignity, compassion and the invitation for dialogue exhibited by CEO Rebecca H. Morrison-Stoney.

Online comments should be tied to known accounts

The subject of #DFMChat this week among Digital First Media journalists was improving conversations on social media. Specifically, it addressed trolling or online bullying.

Bill Keller writes, in “The Bullying Pulpit,” his piece for the New York Times, that anonymity is license to be vicious. Chat moderator Ivan Lajara shared a link to Keller’s commentary as an introduction to the subject.

I offered a suggestion in response to a question of how to deal with online bullying:

Comment platform hosts should insist that posting ability be tied to an identified account. The host can then actively block abusive users from being able to persist in online bullying.

Why were unidentified sources permitted to ‘diagnose’ Newtown, Conn. shooter?

Why were unidentified sources permitted to “diagnose” Adam Lanza, identified as the gunman in Friday’s Connecticut school shooting?

Building a case against privacy on the Internet

My assignment for a Cuesta College course in Internet ethics is to argue that “Individual citizens don’t need the right to privacy in order to discharge their rights as citizens.”

Tie online comments to registered accounts

The Sun Chronicle in Attleboro, Mass. has implemented a policy to discourage obnoxious commenting on its online discussion threads: charge a one-time fee of 99 cents through a valid credit card and attach the user's name as it appears on that card to all comments the user makes, along with the user's community.