Last summer the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, announced that the platform would be taking more of a leadership role when it comes to tackling online bullying. With over a billion active users, they are well positioned to make an impact. In a message to users, he discussed some ways Instagram has been using technology…
Last summer, Illinois (somewhat quietly) passed a new bullying law that took effect on January 1, 2015. The law includes language similar to at least 13 other states which makes it clear that schools have the authority to discipline students for cyberbullying that occurs off campus (and outside of a school-sponsored activity), when such behavior…
I’ve been chatting with Canadian cyberbullying educator and speaker Lissa Albert about various apps for cell phones and their potential for misuse, and it has been one fascinating conversation. As such, she volunteered to write up a summary for our blog – which really paints a comprehensive picture as to what is available out there…
I have been chatting with my colleague Nancy Willard from Embrace Civility in the Digital Age about Facebook in schools, and how they should and should not be used by educators. These are her recent thoughts with some of my input added…just to get some more discussion going on this issue. We both think that…
Sameer and I are just putting the finishing touches on a paper that examines the social networking behaviors of adolescents who are on MySpace. For the past five years, we have annually taken random samples of MySpace profiles and analyzed them for content to ascertain any changes in adolescent participation and information sharing on the…
If you’ve logged into Facebook over the last few hours, you may have noticed an open letter from its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. The letter discusses forthcoming improvements to better safeguard the experience and participation of users on the site. We at the Cyberbullying Research Center highly approve of these changes, and believe they will assist…
An interesting controversy has emerged in the last couple of weeks over the word “meep.” What does meep even mean? Frankly, it doesn’t really matter. In fact there are numerous and varied definitions of, and uses for, the word meep. The most frequent use among adolescents, it seems, is to replace an inappropriate word with…
Following up from my last blog post, and after talking to a number of individuals working in various school districts, this is what we know: 1) FERPA allows schools who learn the identity of a cyberbully upon investigation of an incident that affects the climate or environment or values of the school to protect that…
Following up from my last blog post, and after talking to a number of individuals working in various school districts, this is what we know: 1) FERPA allows schools who learn the identity of a cyberbully upon investigation of an incident that affects the climate or environment or values of the school to protect that…
In April, Justin briefly blogged about this article from the Washington post entitled My Students. My Cellphone. My Ordeal. I’d like to follow up by saying that more educators are contacting us with questions on what to do in cases where students have cell phones with sexually-explicit pictures of other youth on them. While the…
Thankfully, Facebook is soon going to restructure the way it displays privacy settings to users. Currently, those settings are scattered across multiple pages, and it is a chore for individuals to customize them to their liking. When we talk to elementary, middle, and high-schoolers, we ask about those settings – and have found that very…
As most of you know, Justin and I have conducted some studies on the youth use of social networking sites. Our primary intention was to determine if and how adolescents are rendering themselves vulnerable to victimization based on the content (diary entries, personal information, pictures, video, etc.) they post within their profile pages. This content…