Your kid enjoys texting so you gifted him a Smartphone on his fifteenth birthday, it’s only a week since he started using it and the news of one of his school mate cyberbullied him caught your thought. The incident has tormented your child completely and you are still not sure what had happened with your boy.
From the whole episode that affected your kid what you didn’t realize is that your son is a victim of text bombing, a cyberbullying technique which is an outcome of apps that enable you to torment your target with up to 10, 000 text messages.
Text bombing is an evil…
A text bomb is nothing but a process of sending a text 1, 000 to 10, 000 times in a single day with the help of apps like SMS Bomber, SMS Barrage, Text Bomb Elite, etc. Such awe-full apps can be used to send messages like, “I love you”, “I miss you”, “You are ugly”, “I hate you”, “You should die”, and many others, and harm a victim emotionally. The good messages like “I love you” can definitely not affect a person’s esteem but the bad ones like “You are so ugly”, “You should die”, “I hate you,” can torment them completely.
Effect of Text bombing on kids
Most of the kids use this as a tool to take revenge on their “ex”, some to show feelings of love and hatred, and many to simply play a prank, however, not everyone is strong enough to handle such pranks. In the year 2011, a fifteen years old girl Danielle Cox, commit suicide after she was humiliated by her schoolmate who sent her 100 text messages like “I don’t miss you”, “You are not important”, “Just end it already.”
Sending such harsh messages thousands of time could be a harmless prank for many kids but for most of them it’s an effective way to torment someone’s feelings.
Beware of apps used for Text bombing
There are numerous apps found all over the Internet that you may use for text bombing, which includes, SMSBOMBER (Android) to send a text to the user at anytime, SMSBARRAGE to send 100 messages to a single user at one time, and TEXT BOMB ELITE (Apple and Android) to send 1000 messages to one user at one time.
The Google App Store has banned the popular text bombing apps like SMSBOMBER and SMSBARRAGE due to malicious text bombing.
Measures to be taken
While the Google App Store has banned text-bombing, they can still be found over the Internet. However, to stop them from affecting your kid’s life completely, you can download spam-blocking apps that you may find on Google Play and iTunes. Here are few…
- TEXT BOMB DEFENDER is an Android app that runs in the background of your cell phone while blocking all unwanted texts.
- ANTI SMS BOMB is again an Android app that block repeated messages from same number as well as saves your battery from being drained.
- NUMBER COP is an iPhone app that protects you from all spam and fishing texts.
In addition to spam-blocking apps, you must also keep a track of your kid’s online programs, apps, social sites, phones and devices and ask them often if they know what each app is used for. If there is anything that they don’t really use should be deleted. Also, you must explain your kid that anything they put in digital form can be shared with the world, therefore the posts, photos, text messages they share on social sites should be kept protected.
The one and only benefit of having a text bomb application on your phone is that you can send multiple messages at a same time. On other hand, it is a serious underground problem that one has to deal with to save their children from falling as victim of cyber-bullying.
