Hey everyone! Meet my friend Lucia – she is the perfect person to give you an updated perspective on how teens are using social media in 2021, based on her personal experiences and the observations she’s made among her peer group. I think she deeply understands the draw and attraction of particular apps, and has thought through some of the negative implications for user well-being and mental health. If you have any questions, please let me know and I’ll pass them on for Lucia to address in the Comments! ~Sameer Hi! My name is Lucia and I am currently a senior at a high school in South Florida. By just reading this you wouldn’t know that I wrote that sentence about an hour ago, before I took what I thought was going to be a “short” break on my phone. Social media is a portal that’s so easy to fall into when accessed. Whether we’re sending our friends memes on Instagram or posting our mouthwatering dinner on our Snapchat stories, social media connects each and every one of us in one...

Recently, a unique cyberbullying situation came to light involving a 50-year-old woman who targeted teenage girls in her Bucks County, Pennsylvania community last summer. The most interesting twist was not the vast age difference between the aggressor and the targets, but that fact that software was used to alter original images found online to make it seem like the other girls – who belonged to a cheerleading club her daughter previously attended – were nude, engaged in underage drinking, and/or using vaping products (prohibited by the gym). These were spread via harassing text messages from anonymous phone numbers unrecognizable to the girls, and also included a suggestion that one of the girls kill herself. The term “deepfake” (“deep learning + fake”) itself seemed to have originated on Reddit back in 2017 when a number of users began sharing their creations with each other. Generally speaking, it involves the use of artificial intelligence (AI) (rooted in machine learning...

B.L. was a promising cheerleader at Mahanoy Area High School in Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania. She had been involved in the sport since elementary school, and as a freshman participated on the junior varsity team. Going into her sophomore year, she was hoping to make the varsity squad. To her disappointment, she was once again placed on the JV team, overlooked in favor of a new freshman at the school. As any teen would be, she was very upset about this. And as many teens do, she expressed her frustration on social media. Specifically, she posted two messages to her Snapchat story, which included a photo of her and a friend raising their middle fingers with the caption “F*** school f*** softball f*** cheer F*** everything.” The school responded by kicking her off the team for a year for violating school and team rules which required cheerleaders to “have respect for [their] school, coaches, . . . [and] other cheerleaders”; avoid “foul language and inappropriate gestures”; and refrain...

UPDATED for 2021! This detailed guide is a nine-page summary – filled with as much useful information as possible – to equip educators, parents, and other youth-serving adults to spot cyberbullying, respond to it appropriately and meaningfully, and to prevent its future occurrence among those they care for. If you only have time to read one fact sheet from the Cyberbullying Research Center to get up-to-speed about the problem and what you can do, read this one. Hinduja, S. & Patchin, J. W. (2021). Cyberbullying fact sheet: Identification, Prevention, and Response. Cyberbullying Research Center. Retrieved [insert date], from https://cyberbullying.org/Cyberbullying-Identification-Prevention-Response-2021.pdf Download PDF (NOTE: We have a much older version of this Cyberbullying fact sheet available here, in case you were looking for it or had linked to it from another site: https://cyberbullying.org/Cyberbullying-Identification-Prevention-Response.pdf) The post Cyberbullying Fact...

(For a formatted .pdf version of this article for distribution, click here]). Sexting is when someone takes a naked or semi-naked (explicit) picture or video of themselves, usually using their phone, and sends it to someone else. Some teens participate in sexting voluntarily as a way to flirt or be intimate with a romantic partner, while others might be coerced or manipulated into sharing explicit images. Due to the varying nature of sexting incidents, care should be taken to address the behavior in a way that minimizes harm of the person depicted. Below are ten tips to help parents deal with sexting when it occurs. 1. GATHER INFORMATION. Your first task is to determine what happened. Did your child send an explicit image to someone else or receive one? If received, is the image of the sender, or someone else? If your child received an explicit image from the person depicted, instruct them to delete it immediately, and have them convey to the other person that must never send content...

I pick my son up from school most days, and from his first day of kindergarten I got into the habit of routinely asking him two specific questions: 1) “How was your day?” and 2) “Was there any bullying?” I’d ask the latter question with a conspiratorial raise of my brow—as if asking him if they’d served Five Guys burgers for lunch in the cafeteria. These daily interrogations started out as a lighthearted way to get my son to talk a little about his day, although I was also genuinely interested in the nature and extent of bullying at his school. He’d sat in the back row of enough of my presentations starting at an early age to know the basics of bullying and other trouble kids can get into at school and online. I didn’t expect much in terms of content for my research in the stories he would tell, but more than anything my goal was to open up a line of communication between him and I on this topic that most kids don’t like discussing. I hoped that these early low-stakes conversations...