Delivering on the Promise of Innovation to Help Prevent CyberBullying
Posted by Aneesh Chopra and Howard Schmidt on September 26, 2011 at 10:15 AM EDT
Last Thursday, the 2nd Annual Bullying Summit closed with demonstrable progress on a range of important topics surfaced during President Obama’s Bullying Prevention Summit last March. Our focus last March was on the challenges and opportunities in preventing cyberbullying. In the months that followed our roundtable, we are pleased to report on two commitments in response to the White House’s “Call to Action”:
1.Facebook pledged to invest in research grants on the most innovative approaches to bullying prevention found across our Nation’s universities and non-profits. Last month, Facebook delivered on this promise by launching the $200,000 “Digital Citizenship Research Grant”. We look forward to celebrating the inaugural awardees when they are announced later this fall.
2.MTV offered to collaborate with the MIT Media Lab to encourage innovative approaches to detect and deter cyberbullying. MTV and MIT delivered on this promise by formalizing a partnership centered around “Over the Line?”, a Web and iPhone app where young people share and rate personal stories of how technology is complicating social interactions. The app has elicited a strong and empathetic response – with more than 9,000 user-submitted stories generating over 325,000 ratings – and it represents one of the largest bodies of knowledge on youth digital ethics.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/09/ ... erbullying