First of all, I would like to condemn the horrible acts of abuse and evil comments left by others on the ask.fm website which led to untimely and tragic death of Hannah Smith. It’s disgusting and abhorrent.

This is not a subject I usually cover, however, given that so much of what I do is online, both on blogs and social media, I felt that I could not avoid writing a post demanding better actions be taken.

I would like to start off by saying social media has completely revolutionized the internet and the way we communicate as humans. You only have to look at some of the contacts and conversations made on Twitter to see that is has become such a massive tool to most businesses. The banter is good and I have always found Twitter to be a generally nice place where people are kind and productive.

However, with Twitter, as with every other social media platform, there are those people which use the anonymity given to abuse the trust social media gives. We have seen highlighted more recently the increasingly wide spread bullying occurring on social media, making lives for other people a living hell. In some cases, it has had dire consequences.

Up to now, I think most have been of the opinion that social media sort of regulates itself, or that a light touch by the companies operating them was OK. But after such awful cases being highlighted, it is now very clear that a massive amount more has to be done to patrol these sites.

Remember, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, ask.fm are all companies which are more than big enough to be able to effectively put far better procedures in place to protect people from the sorts of disgusting comments we have seen. I’m not quite sure why there aren’t better controls in place already. Maybe they don’t want to spend the money, or maybe they are scared of looking like snoopers and trying to control the freedom of the internet. But when abuse on their sites are forcing people to kill themselves, then all that goes out of the window and action absolutely must be taken.

In the past on here, I have had some pretty strongly worded comments. I wouldn’t class them as bullying. In fact there has only been one comment which has angered me since doing this blog, and that was about my girlfriend. The best angry comment I had was the one which started the #mouthykid hashtag. I should thank that person really ;-)

I have also started a forum on here, which I fully understand I need to police very well to make sure it doesn’t cause any offence.

What I would like to see is our Govt, and others from around the world summon the biggest internet companies and force them to make improvements to stop these awful cases from happening again. We have a very good thing going here with social media, it is down to us and the powers that be to make sure it isn’t ruined.

My thoughts and wishes go out to the family of Hannah, as well as the other families which have suffered tragic circumstances because of cyber bullying.