Victim Zero: The Internet Bullying of Monica Lewinsky by Michael Erbschloe - HTML preview

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Monica Lewinsky in 2016

 

In 2014 Monica Lewinsky began utilizing her experience with a 16 year old wave of abuse and shaming for one greater campaign she is now crusading for, Cyberbullying. Since she was the first person to have their reputation destroyed over the internet, she declared that she would now use her experience to help others deal with cyberbullying and online violations of privacy.

As she has spoken for the victims of cyberbullying she mentioned the passing of Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old Rutgers freshman who jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge after his roommate secretly videotaped and live streamed Tyler kissing another man.

Monica Lewinsky promotes NoBullying.com which features many pages dedicated to parents, teens, teachers, health professionals as well as posts related to cyber safety and the latest news about law making concerning curbing Bullying worldwide as well as inspirational Bullying Poems and famous Bullying Quotes. The website regularly updates its bullying statistics and cyberbullying statistics as it is essential to understand how widespread the bullying epidemic has become. It also regularly runs cyberbullying surveys and questionnaires to get recent updated statistics on everything related to cyberbullying. NoBullying.com has a very good article about Monica Lewinsky on the website.(4)

“How Do We Move Beyond The Darkest Moments In Our Lives?” Is the title of the Ted Talk that Monica Lewinsky did in 2016. Earlier, on in 2015 at TED2015 Truth and Dare, in Vancouver, Canada she made a presentation entitled “The Price of Shame.”

The TED conference is an annual five-day live event that host 1,300 delegates and 70+ talks and performances. TED is a nonprofit organization devoted to “Ideas Worth Spreading,” usually in the form of short, powerful talks (18 minutes or fewer) delivered by contemporary leading thinkers and doers. Many of these talks are given at TED's annual conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, and made available, free, on TED.com. TED speakers have included Bill Gates, Jane Goodall, Elizabeth Gilbert, Sir Richard Branson, Nandan Nilekani, Philippe Starck, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Sal Khan and Daniel Kahneman.(6) (ted.com)

Monica Lewinsky has also received a Masters in Social Psychology from the London School of Economics and Political Science. In 2014, she released an essay for Vanity Fair named Shame and Survival, which was nominated for a National Magazine Award. She is currently involved with anti-bullying projects in the United States and the United Kingdom.(5)

Monica Lewinsky was a speaker at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in June 2015. Tham Khai Meng, Worldwide Chief Creative Officer at Ogilvy & Mather, said: "Monica Lewinsky is an eloquent, courageous and highly intelligent woman as evidenced by her recent TED Talk "The Price of Shame," which has had over 5 million views to date. As the living embodiment of what can happen when a human being is dehumanized online by virtual stone throwers, she moves the important topic of cyberbullying center stage. We are proud to support Monica in her mission to stamp out online harassment. We believe businesses like ours can play an important role in getting her inspiring messages out to create a more compassionate, empathetic society."

Monica Lewinsky commented about speaking at the event: "I am honored and grateful for the opportunity that Ogilvy & Mather has given me to speak out on this issue to an extraordinary audience of those who can effect change. We need a cultural revolution on this matter. Public shaming as a blood sport has to stop, and it's time for an intervention on the Internet and in our culture."(7)

Monica Lewinsky is still being exploited and abused on the Internet. A search of major e-commerce website shows over 100 books for sale with a reference to Monica Lewinsky as well as 400 other items of various types many of them sexist or sarcastic. A search of a major auction website shows 340 items for sale many in the same vein of the miscellaneous items for sale on the e-commerce website.

Monica Lewinsky joined Twitter on October 20, 2014 to release three tweets, following no one and gaining almost 73,000 followers in the blink of an eye, following her speech on the same day, her account was bombarded by waves of trolls and bullies slut shaming her with crude references to her past scandal in 1998.

A search of Yahoo showed 1,560,000 results on October 18, 2016. On the same day on her Twitter account Monica Lewinsky had 129,000 followers and 5,880 likes, and has made just over 3,000 Tweets. On Facebook there were 45,000+ talking about Monica Lewinsky and her verified page had just over 50,000 likes.

On Instagram.com Monica Lewinsky is being mocked several times. An Instagram page entitled “monicalewinsky2016” states that “Even Bill prefers Monica over Hillary. This account dedicated to electing Monica Lewinsky for U.S. president. Why choose the lesser of 2 evils?” There are three posts and 12 followers. The photo from her Twitter account was hijacked and used on the Instagram page.