#Burnsteem25 || Steemit Engagement Challenge S4-W1 | My view on Cyber Bullying - by @simonnwigwe

Greetings friends here in Cameroon,
It is a great honour to be here with you all. The steemit engagement challenge for this season has brought us all to this very wonderful country and community. I'm delighted to be among those participating in this wonderful program organised by the steemit team.

This is the first week of the engagement challenge and the community has presented us with a very wonderful topic to kick-start the journey. This week we are looking at a topic Cyber Bullying, I will be using the questions below to explain my understanding of the said topic. Let's get started.

The word cyberbullying is a conjunction of two different words I.e cyber and bullying. When we talk about the word cyber, we are referring to something related to computing whereas when we talk about the word bullying we are referring to a scenario where you treat people unkind, harass, intimidate or torture people.

Having explained these two terms perfectly, we can see cyberbullying as a means of torturing people or treating people unkind using computing devices or social media. As I have clearly explained above, cyberbullying or you can call it cyber harassment is a means of treating people unkind in cyberspace which is the internet. Here you don't get to meet the person face to face to torture him/her, you do that online.

There are ways in which you can bully someone online and a few of these ways will be listed below so that we don't get ourselves limited to only one aspect of the harassment.

From the above listed few ways in which a person can be bullied online, you will agree with me that anyone who has used social media or computing devices for a year or more might have had one experience or the other.

So concerning the question above, I have been a victim of cyberbullying on several occasions. Most of these include hacking my profile (social media) and using it to defraud others. Sending hateful messages about me online and also quarrelling with people online.

As I have said earlier, I'm a victim of cyberbullying on several occasions. When I joined Facebook newly, I had no idea that accounts can be hacked and as a young person, I was always ready to explore and get new knowledge.

On one of the occasions, a link was sent to me by someone who happens to be a close friend, I clicked on the link and within a few minutes later I couldn't access my account again. I called the person and told him this is the situation I was facing with my account but he said his account too has been facing the same issue for quite a while now and that is when I knew that his account too was hacked.

When I went further to check my blog via a friend's account, I discover that my account was been used to advertise quick cash and since a lot of people know me and they trust that I can't post anything fake they started sending money and few called me to confirm so I hurriedly wrote using my friends account not to fall for the scam going on in my account.

There is no iota of doubt about the fact that anytime we encounter cyberbullying, we get affected especially psychological. In my case, I felt betrayed, lonely and weak.

A lot of people at that moment lost their money because they taught I was the person operating the account. It also brought issues between me and a few of my clients at that time because some of them taught I was the person that did it and late came to tell them that I was not the one and that the account was hacked.

It took me a little time to recover from the shock because I lost a whole lot of contact at that moment. My business within that period depreciated since I couldn't get across my business partners at that point.

I feel very safe on the steemit platform because you have complete control of your account. Once you don't share your account details with anyone for any reason, then your account will remain yours forever.

We have also seen this cyberbullying here on the platform where someone will drop a link and ask users to click and get free steem. We have a lot of caution articles telling us never to click on any article because there is no free steem anywhere. You have to earn all your steem on the platform.

So in the aspect of being safe, since I understand the trick used by these people, I feel very safe because I'm certain they can't get access to my account. I have never been bullied here on this platform before. I'm extremely careful with the things I do here.

My encounter taught me not to always click on any link without proper confirmation. The guides I have read from this noble platform have also given me an edge on how to dictate which are genuine links and which links are not.

To all those reading this article today, I want to advise you all to stay away from all these scammers coming to you for free steem. The platform doesn't offer free steem. And to the different communities, let no user drop an enclosed link to you as their entry. Some people also use that medium. The link should be seen clearly so that you can know the content of the link.

Furthermore, we can use the tool https://checkshorturl.com/ to confirm if the link is genuine or not by copying and pasting it into this address to see the true address. I want to believe that this will go a long way in keeping us out of cyberbullying.

There are many sides to cyberbullying and I have been able to mention just but a few. Cyberbullying is not just about theft but also about reputation. Your reputation can be reduced to nothing in cyberspace which will in turn cause you depression and even isolation because you won't be free enough any longer to associate with people around you. We are all aware that false or bad image travels faster. I invite @temitopef, @yakspeace and @josepha to also join the contest.