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Alyssa Royse, entrepreneur and business blogger for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, one of Seattle’s daily newspapers, recently wrote an admittedly frivolous post comparing the movie Batman the Dark Knight to risks in a business venture.   In mere hours, fans of the movie cyber-attacked her for the “negative review”, one with such aggressive hate as to wish her gang-raped and shot.  In an email to me, she wrote that she was “stunned” by the response. Sadly, I am not. 

We have created a culture of cowards, those who hide behind the anonymous comment. The media used to castigate such cyber-bullying behavior - until its publishers also got seduced by the web traffic such comments help generate.   So now they participate instead, leaving outrageous comments up to attract others in a one-up-man-ship that’s hard to believe, or ignore.  You can now actually anonymously threaten murder – and website publishers, even those associated with serious news outlets, just check Google Analytics. How pathetic.

In fact, kids as young as 9 years old have committed suicide because of cyber-bullying, and most were horrified when a mother so terrorized a 13-year old girl on My*Space that the teen committed suicide. But a brief look at comments on a number of popular news and blog sites shows you the lesson the pre-teen tormentors learn: When you get older you get to threaten people’s lives, or at the very least rip their reputations to shreds, in ever-larger cyber-playgrounds! Just wait until you grow up - then you can trash an entrepreneur’s reputation on John Cook’s Venture Blog, or stick it to a venture capitalist who didn’t believe in your company on www.thefunded.com!  You can deride a fellow trader on www.Dealbreaker.com or bask in your hope that someone get’s gang-raped and shot for what wasn’t even a real movie review on the Seattle PI - and no one will ever have to know that it’s you - How cool is that? 

Royse, founder of Just Cause It, made the personal decision to leave the comments on her blog post to showcase the level of sexism and cyber-bullying that she has experienced.  Given her business is about promoting causes that are attempting to solve the world's problems, the "hits" from these angry cyber-cowards are ironically about as far from her target market as she can get.  Yet her innocent business blog post yielded comments on popping out babies and going back to the kitchen.  I mean, her blog isn't exactly BitchPhD. 

In reading through the comments on Royse’s blog for a second time, I believe 80% of the comments are likely posted by teenagers and college students - even the comments from some claiming to be women strike me as written by men posing as women because they think it will give their ridiculous comments more credibility.   But you have to wonder about the nuts out there... If you do wonder, here are some things you can do to protect yourself:

1)  Stop using your home address indiscriminately. Get a PO Box from your post office or UPS store, or an Earth Class Mailbox (an online PO Box) if you prefer - and use that address as your main snail mail address for anyone you don’t know.  Once you switch over your credit card statements, you will have the ability to use your new address on any e-commerce website. (Your credit card billing address has to match the address you give to an e-commerce site – this is the main way they check for credit card fraud, so you do need to change your address with your credit card company.)  Then, all you need do is give the ecommerce sites a separate shipping address so your goods still go to your home, but shipping addresses aren’t nearly as easy to get at as the address you record on your bills.   

2)  Check out various yellow page and white page online directories to see if your home address is listed. www.whitepages.com is a good place to start. Most have the ability to sign in and edit your address away from your home address. At the very least, put your business address in there or for fun, how about your neighborhood police department.

3)  See if the blogging company you’ve signed up with captures IP addresses. While not ideal because IP addresses don’t always stay static, if you do experience any real-world trouble it could potentially narrow down where your troublemaker is coming from.

4)  If you own any domain names and haven't specifically selected privacy protection, your address and phone # could be plastered all over the web. Do a domain name lookup in the whoIs database and see if your personal information shows up. If it does, go to your domain registrar and buy privacy protection - it's really cheap - usually only $6 to $8 per year per domain. (Thank you Michelle Calloway)

It’s a shame that this is what we’ve come to, folks.   If you have some other safety tips, let us know and I’ll update this post.