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CELPIP Practice Reading: Reading for Viewpoints ID: #60233 Medium The Week a Rescue Story Turned Ugly

Read the following blog post from a website.

Three weeks ago, a local food writer named Nerys Laberge posted that a famous hockey player had grabbed her arm and pulled her back as a bus ran a red light downtown. Her post was breathless and a little boastful, and it spread across the country in a day. When people teased her, she wrote a second post telling everyone to calm down because there were bigger problems in the world. That is when the joking turned into a flood of insults, and some strangers began emailing the newspaper where she works. I know a tiny version of that feeling. Two years ago a harsh review I wrote about a café brought four hundred angry messages to my inbox in one weekend.

Laberge now says she regrets the tone of both posts. “I was shaken and showing off at the same time, and I handled the reaction badly,” she wrote on Monday. She has asked people to stop messaging her parents, whose home number someone posted online. Florian Lomax, a lawyer who advises people targeted by online abuse, argues that the platforms should carry most of the responsibility. He wants a one-click way to limit replies from strangers during a pile-on, and faster removal of posts that share private addresses or phone numbers.

Jacinta Mailloux, a sergeant with the city police, says most of what Laberge received was rude but not criminal. She told a radio host that officers will act on threats and on private information shared to frighten someone, but police cannot referee every insult. Tancredi Menard, a consultant who helps companies write workplace policies, says the harm often spreads to the office. Employers tend to panic when complaints pour in, he explains, and he believes no one should be disciplined over a viral post until a manager has read what was actually written and spoken with the worker.

I think Lomax is closest to right. The platforms built the tools that let a crowd form in an afternoon, so they should build the brakes too. But Menard’s point matters to me as well, because a pile-on can cost someone a job before anyone has taken a breath. Laberge wrote something silly, and she has said so. This week I am muting the whole topic on my own accounts and refusing to feed it with clicks.

Using the drop-down menu (▾), choose the best option according to the information given on the website.

This blog post is mainly about 1.
.

Who most clearly draws a line between insults and crimes? 2.
.

Florian Lomax’s position would most likely be supported by 3.
.

What outcome does Tancredi Menard’s condition call for? 4.
.

The blogger mentions the café review mainly to 5.
.

The following is a comment by a visitor to the website page. Complete the comment by choosing the best option to fill in each blank.

I walk past that same downtown corner every morning on my way to work, so this story felt very close to home. Nerys Laberge was pulled back just as 6.
, so of course she was rattled, and I might have posted something silly too. Her second post, where she told everyone to 7.
, is the one people quote most. I felt sick reading that strangers were calling 8.
, since those people never wrote a word. Florian Lomax wants platforms to offer 9.
, and that idea makes more sense to me than calling the police. The café review you wrote 10.
 still gets mentioned in our neighbourhood, so I know the pile-on stung.

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