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Metaverse risks and harms among US youth: Experiences, gender differences, and prevention and response measures
We have a brand new piece just published in New Media and Society! We are excited about this contribution to the literature base based on a nationally-representative sample of 5,005 youth in the United States. Most importantly, we’ve distilled the findings into clear recommendations for platforms, parents and guardians, teen users, content creators, and schools. […]
Instagram Teen Accounts – A Win for Parents and Legislators
Instagram just announced a significant update to the way they safeguard and support teen users on their platform, and I believe that this development is timely, well-constructed, and one that should lead to measurable benefits. These changes will initially be made to all accounts of youth under 18 years of age in the US, UK, […]
Responding to Cyberbullying: Strategies for School Counselors
Technology has created many opportunities for students to be hurtful to each other in a variety of ways, and has made interpersonal peer conflict even more challenging for schools to deal with. This is complicated by the reality that youth have always been hesitant to confide in adults when faced with problems with peers. In […]
Digital Self-Harm: The Growing Problem You’ve Never Heard Of
Sameer and I first became aware of digital self-harm over a decade ago when we learned of the suicide of Hannah Smith. She was 14 years old when she ended her life after being mistreated online. The resulting investigation determined that the threats and hurtful comments directed toward her on the anonymous app Ask.fm were […]
Lessons Learned from Ten Generative AI Misuse Cases
Generative AI can contribute to a wide range of possible risks and harms that can affect the emotional and psychological well-being of others, their financial state of affairs, and even their physiological health and physical safety. Both users and platforms (as well as government!) have a clear role to play, and I’ve explained their respective […]
Teens and AI: Virtual Girlfriend and Virtual Boyfriend Bots
A school counselor who works in a private school in California recently emailed me to ask for help as it relates to students and the misuse of specific AI bots. Her concerns, though, did not surround general purpose AI bots like Snapchat’s My AI or Microsoft’s CoPilot, but rather those that are specifically used as […]
When Your Mother is Your Cyberbully
Last winter when Sameer and I were writing the third edition of Bullying Beyond the Schoolyard (published last fall!), we spent quite a bit of time searching for unique examples of cyberbullying to include in the book. One of the more interesting cases I came across involved a 14-year-old girl from Beal City, Michigan. I […]
World Anti-Bullying Forum 2023!
It’s been over a month, but I still catch myself smiling when I think of the memories made at the 2023 World Anti-Bullying Forum (WABF). For those not familiar, WABF is an international forum and biennial conference focused on understanding and preventing bullying, cyberbullying, and other forms of interpersonal violence against children and young people. Delegates […]
Cyberbullying Continues to Rise among Youth in the United States
Here at the Cyberbullying Research Center, we routinely collect data from middle and high school students so that we can keep on top of what they are experiencing online. Over the last two decades, we have completed about twenty unique studies of teens and tweens in the United States involving more than 30,000 subjects. And […]
Social Media, Youth, and New Legislation: The Most Critical Components
In my last piece, I discussed how some legislation in various US states has been proposed without careful consideration of the contributing factors of internalized and externalized harm among youth. More specifically, I expressed concern that the complexities surrounding why youth struggle emotionally and psychologically demand more than simplistic, largely unenforceable solutions. We recognize that […]
