Positive Post-It Day
In case you haven’t heard, Positive Post-It Day is a worldwide phenomenon – and it all began with a Canadian teenager in the fall of 2014 who wanted to flip the script on bullying. Alberta student Caitlin Haacke was bullied at school and threatened on Facebook with suggestions to take her own life. Instead of […]
The Social Bond: A Practical Way for Schools to Reduce Bullying
If you work in the youth safety space, you know that certain initiatives (such as resilience building) have focused on targets of bullying and cyberbullying. Other programming has concentrated attention on aggressors – to the kids who harass, humiliate, and threaten other youth offline and online. Here, restorative practices and social emotional learning (anger management, […]
My Fulbright Award for Bullying and Cyberbullying Prevention
This past summer, I served as a Fulbright Specialist at the Anti-Bullying Centre (ABC) at Dublin City University (DCU) in Dublin, Ireland. It was an amazing experience. I just wanted to take a few minutes to share what it involved, who I spent time with, and how it made an impact – not just short-term, […]
Harmful Speech Online: At the Intersection of Algorithms and Human Behavior
Last week, I attended a workshop at Harvard entitled “Harmful Speech Online: At the Intersection of Algorithms and Human Behavior.” Sponsored and organized by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Institute for Strategic Dialogue, and Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy, its goal was to “broadly explore harmful speech […]
How Machine Learning Can Help Us Combat Online Abuse: A Primer
Ten years ago, computer scientists would contact our Center and ask if we could give them thousands of examples of cyberbullying content – which they wanted to comb through to look for trends and patterns in how harm was inflicted. Nowadays, they don’t ask for data because it’s widely available for them to web scrape […]
Reflections on the 2017 World Anti-Bullying Forum
The inaugural World Anti-Bullying Forum was held in Sweden this week (where the cherry blossoms were blooming!), and I had the honor of representing the Cyberbullying Research Center and the International Bullying Prevention Association (IBPA) in attending. I am doing some work at Dublin City University for the first half of this summer, and so […]
How Parents Can Build Resilience With Activities, Movies, and Books
We have talked a lot about resilience over the last year, and have shared some practical ways to cultivate that ability. Today, I want to provide some additional tangible strategies to help you further. I have previously discussed that it is critical for kids to be placed intentionally in situations where they can discover their […]
The ABC Model to Build Resilience Against Cyberbullying
Resilience online is built in the same way as resilience offline. We must provide opportunities for youth to face social and relational problems head on, and to recognize their own strength, agency, and power to overcome them – do so within an environment of supportive resources (so they know you and I have their back!). […]
League of Legends and Cyberbullying
League of Legends (or League for short) is the most popular multiplayer online game in the world, and takes place in a 3-D battle arena setting involving role-playing and real-time strategy elements into its live environment. Players in League (also known as “summoners”) are matched up with others depending on their skill and game level […]
Facebook’s Global Safety Network Summit: Online Well-Being
A couple weeks ago, I attended Facebook’s annual Global Safety Network Summit in Washington, DC, to hang out with colleagues and long-time friends, and to make some new connections as well. Facebook first discussed the new safety initiatives they are implementing such as their outstanding new suicide prevention tools in Live and Messenger (check them […]
