Cyberbullying Detection and Schools
Social
media is extremely popular among today’s youth and while social media can
provide great ways to keep in touch with people it also provides the
opportunity for the emergence of cyberbullying.
Cyberbullying can be anything like messages, images or videos that are
intended to make someone feel negatively about themselves and/or embarrass them
in some way. Cyberbullying is very
harmful to for the victims increasing their risk for anxiety, depression,
substance abuse and mental illness. It
can also lead to violent behaviors such as carrying weapons to school, physical
fighting, and even school shootings (Dredze).
Through the technology that is available today it is possible to detect
and potentially prevent cyberbullying, however this is hindered due to privacy
concerns and free speech rights of the students.
Today’s
technology has allowed for the creation of certain programs that can aid in
detecting cyberbullying. These programs
generally work by examining language with the objective of detecting “sensitive
topics, such as sexuality, race/culture, intelligence and physical attributes,
flagging negative comments that contain profanity and insults, and general
identification of offensive language.” (Dredze). Additionally, the use of algorithms to look
for more subtle bullying or taking gender into consideration can help improve
the results of these programs even further (Dredze). Programs such as this can help schools to
more easily identify when cyberbullying is occurring among students since it is
rarely reported by students.
Furthermore, the technology can be used to set up a system in which
empathy is promoted and victims are provided with the necessary resources to
cope with cyberbullying.
Despite
the existence of this technology many schools question whether or not they can
use it or other methods to detect cyberbullying without violating the free
speech or privacy of students. In some
schools the law agrees that they are within their legal rights to take action
against what students do online outside of school such as in a September 2013
case where a student was suspended for writing threatening messages on Myspace
(Sengupta). However, there are also
cases where the law has denied that schools were in the legal right such as in a
2011 Indiana court case that stated that the school was in the wrong when they
disciplined a group of girls for posting lewd pictures on Facebook
(Sengupta). This ambiguity in what
actions they are and are not allowed to take against student’s online activity
often seems to hinder what they schools are willing to do in monitoring and disciplining
of this activity.
If
schools are not given the legal right to take action against student’s online
activity then the development of the detection software may not have the
desired effect of helping to end cyberbullying.
As previously mentioned victims of cyberbullying are often more prone to
violent behavior and by allowing schools to intervene in bullying they could
possibly also be avoiding future incidents with the victims acting out
violently as a result of their bullying.
Reader: "Understanding Factors of Youth Violence Through the Study of Cyberbullying" by Mark Dredze
