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Comment by dtech | Hacker News Reader

I do not agree with your assertion. Bullying is similar to spam and other unwanted messages. You can never get 100% protection, but you can get pretty far.

Things like Whatsapp not giving you a way to prevent you from being added to a group (until very recently) are fixable. Victims could not even prevent themselves from being constantly added to the "Jimmy go kill yourself" group.

If I translate your post to spam filtering all efforts there are useless and everyone should disable their spam filters, because either you receive spam or you don't.

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>Bullying is similar to spam and other unwanted messages.

It really isn't. You can mentally deal with a spam email or two a day. It only takes one nasty message or post on social media to devastate a kid for a month, so you need 100% perfect protection and you're not going to get that, regardless of how much monitoring, moderating and AI you throw at the problem.

My argument isn't that we shouldn't try to prevent online bullying, but we need to set our goals for success lower than we'd like. If Instagram tries to prevent bullying, we can't complain when they aren't 100% successful, but people will do just that.

Bullies then figure out how to make new unblocked accounts, stalk you around the internet on other services and spam you there.

I think we need to address bullies directly, figure out their reasoning and help to resolve those issues. Problem is few actually do get addressed long before it's too late.

> stalk you around the internet on other services and spam you there

That's not a good reason for (e.g., Whatsapp) to not put in some frankly minimal effort to prevent this on their platform.

Every barrier we can out in place will result in fewer bullies making it through the funnel. It’s like a marketing funnel in reverse.

>Victims could not even prevent themselves from being constantly added to the "Jimmy go kill yourself" group.

What’s the difference between inviting Jimmy to that group and just messaging him in private asking him to kill himself? Seems like a pointless feature. (Let’s remember that users you’ve blocked could never add you to groups.)

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