While scowering Netflix’s vast library of movies to spend my Friday night watching alone, I came across a film that has four stars. After watching, I found out it deserves less than one star, and to be burnt at the stake. I’ve decided to make a series where I search online streaming services, such as Netflix ad Hulu, and try to find the worst of the worst. The movie that caused this to start was “Cyberbully.”
“Cyberbully” is an ABC Family original film about the dangers of the internet through showing the trials and stipulations of a young high school girl who gets cyberbullied. The film takes place in a broken household, your stereotypical high school, and most importantly through a website called “Clicksters.”
Although this film tries to show the dangers of the internet, all it does is create a false narrative through fake clichés and a complete misunderstanding of how high school and the internet works. I don’t understand how this was made into a movie. The complete disregard of the ABC network towards realism goes to show how out of the loop parents are about how the internet works as a bastion of free and open ideas.
The story follows Taylor, a white teenage girl in middle-class suburbia who gets a computer for her birthday. She decides to go on the social media site “Clicksters,” a fake website that needed to be made to push the narrative of the film. Throughout the movie, she pushes her friends away as she keeps being bullied online, and nearly takes her own life from the melodrama ensuing on her social media profile and enveloping in her life.
The film was made to benefit parents and kids by teaching them the basics of how cyberbullying works. Instead of this being a positive learning experience, the ABC Family Network decided to make an entirely new social media platform to be able to create the problem this movie feeds on, and refuses to teach people how to deal with bullies and online libel properly.
The problems of this film stem from the giant misconceptions of how humans relate to each other, and how parent should teach their kids how to deal with bullies. Primarily, it stems from the social media platform ABC created.
At first, I thought ABC made “Clicksters” because they didn’t want to pay extra for using Facebook or Twitter’s name and logo for the movie, but as the film progressed it slowly displayed its true colors. “Clicksters” has significant differences from any popular social media site. Although both Facebook and Twitter have policies on cyberbullying and are extremely strict on the matter, the film’s website has no such thing. The film doesn’t create an atmosphere similar to any modern social media site, and in turn creates an environment where prepubescent high school tweens can constantly berate each other to the point of tears.
As well, why are these kids crying over classmates and other melodramatic teenagers calling them sluts and saying they have, “the Clap.” I understand that my generation has become a degenerate and entitled group of easily offended, melodramatic children, but who seriously cries over being called a slut online as a high school sophomore? It’s a ridiculous claim to say people would rather kill themselves than hit the delete button on posts people put on their profiles.
Speaking of killing themselves, I have never seen a sadder suicide attempt than the one in this film. I can’t believe they had the guts to try and convince people a 15 year old teenager can’t open a prescription bottle. She had about a half hour to commit suicide before anyone would have found her in her house, and she was found in the bathroom struggling to pull the cap off of the bottle. I bet Stephen Hawking could have popped the cap on the bottle more efficiently than this cry-baby.
Finally, the parent’s reaction to her daughter trying to kill herself was deplorable. Instead of using her time to comfort and teach her daughter to be stronger, she asks her local congressman to legislate the internet to stop online bullying. She blames the internet on her daughter attempting suicide, while she forces her daughter to go to group meetings about bullying. The mother should be helping her daughter learn not to be such a wussy over words, seriously. Why should we all have our freedom of speech taken away because you don’t have enough time to give your daughter emotional support?
Overall, this movie was complete trash, not due to the way it was shot, but because of how poorly they communicated important information about how to deal with people being a dick. People will be a dick to you no matter what you do for your entire life, all you have to do is learn to deal with it and stand up for yourself.
