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Smart students’ countermeasures for social media safety

September 11, 2012 By Anne 2 Comments

This is how safety, citizenship, and social change work best in social media. Count on students to lead the way. “After a bullying Twitter account at Linn-Mar High School [in Marion, Iowa] spurred copycats in Iowa City,” students at West High School in the latter city adopted countermeasures, the Iowa City Press Citizen reports. Their strategy was simple and effective: Identify a student being targeted by meanness, “find them on Twitter or Facebook, and say something nice.” Individuals can certainly use these countermeasure tactics too, but a group works better and faster because it can, with multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts, quickly bury the negativity under a pile of support for the person being attacked. The anti-bullies who posted the compliments call themselves the West High Bros. A similar group has started at another school in the area, the Press Citizen reports. The students stay as anonymous as possible, knowing that the show of support is more effective when not seen as coming from personal friends. Read the last few paragraphs to see how this is about changing the school culture.

I’ve talked to security staff at Twitter about safety measures where bullying’s concerned (regardless of age levels), and they confirm how ineffective the alternative is: Block nasty tweets or delete a mean user’s account, and – just as in offline life – you often make the meanie even meaner. The aggressor doubles his/her efforts to upset you. And doubling or tripling them is easy to do on any service where five new accounts can pop up within minutes of one getting deleted. So blocking meanies or mean behavior often only increases: their determination, the amount of mean content, and the amount of attention drawn to the mean content. Much better to swamp the meanie meme with positive action online and offline.

This courageous kindness is the digital version of the “friend zone,” which students have established in high schools to offer lonely, new, or targeted students an ally to call in sticky hallway situations or a friendly place to sit in the lunchroom until they can make their own friends (one of the “Ideas for Student Action,” a paper some of us put together last winter for Harvard’s Berkman Center and the Born this Way Foundation).

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Filed Under: cyberbullying, Literacy & Citizenship, Risk & Safety, Social Media, students, Youth Tagged With: cyberbullying, Facebook, kindness and bravery, Social Media, students, twitter

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  1. Kindness really could be going viral! Just look… by Anne Collier says:
    August 17, 2014 at 11:42 pm

    […] the kind intervention of two high school upperclassmen that sparked Canada’s Pink Shirt Day and students’ anti-bullying countermeasures in Iowa in 2012. Other times the impetus comes from teachers and school officials supporting […]

    Reply
  2. One of the best back-to-school messages I've seen | NetFamilyNews.org says:
    September 12, 2012 at 10:01 pm

    […] such as Canada’s national Pink Shirt Day, which started with one act of kindness, and the collective kindness of high school students in Iowa. And then there’s high school student Annmarie Haubert, who […]

    Reply

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Anne Collier


Bio and my...
2016 TEDx Talk on
the heart of digital citizenship

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IMPORTANT RESOURCES

Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Innovative Public Health Research
Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

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