As Youth Advisory Board members for Meta for almost a decade, Justin and I get the opportunity to use our research findings to shine a spotlight on how their products and services can be improved to better safeguard and support teens. One gap that I’ve always believed could be spanned is the one between social media companies and schools. Every week, our Cyberbullying Research Center receives help requests from students or schools for incidents of harassment, hate accounts, threats, sextortion, and other harms that occur across the Internet and involve various platforms. Then, we individually reach out to our colleagues in Trust and Safety departments at these companies, and work to get the account deleted or content taken down.
Even when we are successful, this is a suboptimal solution. We are happy to help, but it’s cumbersome to serve as the intermediary to make sure 1) the school or student formally reported it through the official channels 2) account names, offending URLs, and/or other digital evidence were provided and 3) the urgency or severity was appropriately conveyed.
What is more, our research involving nationally-representative samples of US middle and high school students show that one-fifth of youth skip school because of cyberbullying, and that over half have been cyberbullied in ways that really affect their ability to learn and feel safe.
Here’s another data point from our work that always grabs me: students feel less safe at school when they are bullied online as compared to when they are bullied at school! The takeaway is that online mistreatment is more fear-inducing than offline mistreatment for many students, often because the aggressor is someone from school (which is in most cases) and/or because the target’s peer group is involved – which broadens and deepens the potential and actual harm.
Here’s the bottom line: schools are nexuses where targets, offenders, and social media misuse frequently come together. As such, there should be well-developed affordances in place to empower them to address these incidents. And it is incumbent upon platforms – where youth spend so much of their time – to provide these.
As a solution, Instagram is expanding a program for US middle and high schools to prioritize their reporting of safety concerns, including instances of bullying. Schools that formally sign up will have their reports escalated and receive updates on actions taken. Instagram pilot-tested this program with 60 schools around the nation, and found that giving schools prioritized reporting of bullying and harassment increased the ability of schools to properly support students when targeted. As such, the program is being deployed far and wide.
Here’s how it works. When you are logged in using the Instagram account you formally created for your school, you will see a banner asking you to sign up for a waitlist to become a school partner. Your account will then be evaluated to make sure it is legitimate, and then you’ll be given a suite of tools and functionality to support students. This includes the aforementioned prioritized reporting, the ability to check the status of reports you have previously filed, and an assortment of research-based resources to help you understand the reporting workflow, and how to effectively report problematic content and interactions. I cannot emphasize this enough: If you work at a school or represent a school, you should sign up for Instagram’s new School Partnership program.
Here’s a final data point based on our research: when we asked students how they responded to their most recent harmful experience online, only 13% of those targeted reported it to the school. Students often tell us that when they report, they don’t want the aggressor to be punished, they don’t want it to become a big deal across school, they don’t want to be part of an intervention or mediation – they just want the problem to go away so they can get back to living their lives. Furthermore, their hesitation is often due to the perceived inefficacy of educators to really help them. From the words of our own research participants who were cyberbullied:“Nobody has done anything about it in the past, so telling would only make it worse.”(17 year-old boy)
“Telling a teacher at school just makes it worse and then everyone laughs at you for telling.”(14 year-old boy)
“No one will do anything and mostly, if I tell anyone the bullying gets much worse.”(17 year-old girl)
Instagram’s School Partnership can bridge that gap and accomplish what students most desire: to make the problem go away. To learn more or sign up, visit about.instagram.com/community/educators. Just remember that you need to enroll with an official school or district account managed by an administrator. If you have any questions about the Program or this process, please let me know. I am genuinely excited that schools will now have a direct connection to Instagram to facilitate prompt and effective help when their students are targeted online.
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