Question

To what extent can social networking sites control cyberbulllying and other forms of harassment that occur in their forums? In the case of MySpace, would a more explicit policy about the rules required to get a legitimate account on that SNS have prevented Lori Drew, the woman who harassed Meier under the alias Josh Evans, from succeeding in bullying Meier online? What implications does the Meier incident have for trust in cyberspace, especialy for young teenagers who participate in social networking services?

Answer 1

Cyberbullying over social media has persistently become a social problem especially among the youth who are the majority user community of these networks. In light of the growing problem of cyber bullying and other acts of harassment, sites such as Facebook and MySpace are using technology to ensure a safer and more user friendly cyber environment.

In light of cyberbullying concerns, Facebook gives the users the appropriate tools such as “Report” feature to better communicate their feelings and alleviate the problems and conflicts that arise with Web bullying . Facebook users are also given the tool “This post is a problem” where they can flag and report harmful textual and visual material, as inappropriate due to nudity or profane visual content. Not only does this feature allow the users to show how the message may be upsetting but also to categorize how the post is harmful to them. This information is then used to determine the issue and its magnitude so that the responsible people can help solve the problem.

More and more social web portals are incorporating technologies that are able to handle this task of ensuring cyber safety in a cost-efficient manner without compromising on the accuracy and speed of the moderation process. Another breakthrough in this regard has been attained by ImageVision which is a human moderated cyber tool that blocks inappropriate and abusive content that is linked to bullying from getting loaded. The technology is triggered by certain key words and runs automatically in the background of social network usage as the content is being shared. Suspect images, text or videos are “flagged” for human moderators to review.

Thus these are some of the measures which have been used by social media networks to ensure a user friendly and safe environment on the internet for millions of people across the globe and they have yielded positive effects in raising awareness about cyberbullying and made the users more proactive in taking the right measures to keep a check on its growth.