Social networking, being a new technology, is used for all sorts of unintended purposes. Some are positive while others can be harmful. Online harassment is one unfortunately negative aspect of social networking, sometimes referred to as "cyberbullying." This normally takes the form of harassing text messages or private or wall messages on various social networking sites.
Cyberbullying can have a much more insidious impact on a young child than the regular bullying the parents of these children experienced when the parents were in school. While most of the bullying I suffered in school was psychological, I could get away from it evenings, weekends, and summers - but there is no real time off or break from bullying that can happen via text or internet 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
MIT graduate student Karthik Dinakar saw a CNN special on cyberbullying and wondered if anything was being done to use computational linguistics to detect and mitigate cyberbullying on social networking sites. With the help of his advisors and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab, Dinakar started to research the issue and partnered with various social media sites, as well as MTV, and eventually ended up at the White House at a national summit on bullying. Data gathered by MIT and MTV is available online.
Dinakar's reaction to this situation demonstrates what I believe is a key tendency of geeks - rather than look at a situation and feel helpless, geeks will start to think about solutions, and how technology can be part of a solution. I applaud Dinakar's work and hope that it helps kids navigate the treacherous world of adolescence.
