Did You Know The Social Network is a Great Movie and a Great Lesson?

By Hilary DeCesare, CEO of Everloop

Like everyone else on the planet, we were excited to see The Social Network, the new feature film about the founding of Facebook. Amazing work by director David Fincher and writer Aaron Sorkin, and terrifically played by a first-rate cast.

Insiders will debate how much of the screenplay was based on honest recollections by individuals telling the truth, and how much on stories they concocted to settle scores with each other. But there seems to be no debate about one important detail – the whole enterprise began as the result of an online incident that was incredibly cruel and personally humiliating to one student in particular. The fact that the meanness spread like wildfire across the Harvard campus seemed to provide proof of concept; that the Internet was going to be powerful and that people want to connect through it.
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The perpetrator of the prank the movie feels remorse and tries to apologize, but he learns something many of us, and our kids, have learned the hard way – that the Internet “isn’t written in pencil.” That reputation can be irreparably damaged. That your comments can do grievous, permanent harm. And that words do hurt.

Still today, if you really want to be anonymously mean to someone, there’s almost nothing that can be done online to stop it. I said, ALMOST nothing.

Because on Everloop, you are stopped. You can’t flame, can’t curse, can’t bully. Those are our rules. And we monitor the site day and night to make sure the rules are followed. We also make it easy for you to identify someone breaking the rules without identifying yourself. In fact, we reward our users for being good digital citizens and keeping the neighborhood clean.

But even before things get to that level, we employ some pretty amazing technology to identify activity and postings that lead to bullying. And an entirely different technology that shares information with other sites to keep the rotten eggs off Everloop before they can even sign up. To read all about our different levels of monitoring software, click here.

The Internet has come a long way since the founding of Facebook. To think that just six years ago, they were celebrating their first million users. And now they’re up to over 500 million! We’ve come a long way as well in protecting the youngest users among us and in giving them a fun, production, and safe experience on line. It’s called Everloop.