Brazilian student fined for online abuse on Orkut
This is a guest post by Gitta Wilén, Scriptwriter for interactive Media at Houdini web agency.
A college student in Brazil has been condemned to pay 3 500 reails (about 1 700 US dollars) for abusing a fellow student at the online community Orkut.
Globo.com reports about a student that had created a community at Orkut, where he wrote about his fellow student as being an extraterrestrial.
The victim of the abuse, who became a target for mocking and laughs, at the college in the Metropolitan Area of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, decided to start a process against the student and was successful. But the student is still able to reply to the supreme court in Brasília, Brazil.
As my Brazilian friend Luis Fernando Sandes was online, I asked him what he thinks about this story and that Brazilian internet users are treating each other bad on the web?
– I can not think of something that happens in virtual life that does not happens in real life. That goes for both good and bad things, he says.
He thinks that we should expect to see things like this happening on the internet. People are always going to mock eachother and it is impossible to control what people are doing on the web. He himself has not been the target of any abuse.
Luis thinks that people won’t stop creating communities like this. But that the people who are managing Orkut and other communities should work on engines to detect and erase them easily.
– If necessary send the content to the police and punish the guilty, as it would be treated in real life, he says.
Luis joined Orkut because he thought that it would be a nice place where he could get in contact with people from different places, such as Recife or Stockholm.
– It is a just another way to keep in touch with friends and to meet new people. But it is not much harder to keep in touch with them without Orkut, he says.
On the question why Orkut has been such a great success in Brazil he answers:
– Many Brazilians are communicative and friendly, maybe that is the reason?
Luis has only been using Orkut so far, but he is looking for entering Second Life, because he has heard a lot about it.
– Maybe Second Life is going to be the next big thing in Brazil, as they are going to translate it to Portuguese?, he says.
Is not the whole of Orkut an abuse today? I was member in a very interesting discussiongroup. We discussed in English. After a while the Brazils took over and they refused to discuss in English. We other could not understand anything,