A kid that commits suicide because of intense bullying at school or videos that go viral of children getting beat up by other children you see or hear these kind of stories very often now a days. With the coming of the internet bullying does not stop when school is over, is goes on and on via the internet and all the communication possibilities that come with it.
The Childrens’ Internet Protection Act tries to prevent these kind of things by preventing students to access harmful or obscene content online, which could result in this extreme behavior.
The startup Securly is supporting this Act by investing in new tools that can detect when children are putting harmful content online, kids that are struggling with suicidal thoughts or kids trying to harm other children. The startup is using machine learning, to determine if a kid is just browsing on the internet for certain information or is really engaging in the before mentioned extreme behavior, based on natural language processing and emotional learning. If Securly detects any of these activities it will alert parent by text so that they can take action.
The information a parent can get about their child’s internet behavior can vary with age. But for now Securly is selling its software only to schools directly. If a school is interested a IT administrator can get a special IP address from Securly and then put it into a DNS server field in their system, and within 15 minutes the school’s browsing activity is protected by the web filter created by Securly.
The next focus is on creating a ‘’Home’’ version for parents that want to look after their child’s internet behavior, and their current business model of selling their software to school districts has huge potential because students all over the world can be in need of this protection. And let’s face it, every parent would like their child to be protected from these kinds of events.
He Jack,
Thanks for your interesting post. I also agree that we need to do something about intense bullying and it is good to see that Securly is going to do something about it.
I also found another article were they discussing this topic. This article is going about a website named; Formspring.me. Formspring is a question and answer based website were users openly invite others to ask and answer questions. What makes this site good is the option for anonymity. Formspring.me allows users to post questions anonymously to any other user’s page. Formspring.me was chosen because the site is populated mostly by teens and college students, and there is a high percentage of bullying content in the data. they are using a language-based method of detecting cyberbullying. By recording words within a post, they are able to correctly identify 78.5% of the posts contain cyberbullying. Maybe this article can give you new insights in detecting cyberbullying.
The only question I have is how do you think the home version should look like? Is it a tool that parents can use?
Greets,
Riemer
http://webpages.ursinus.edu/akontostathis/ReynoldsKontostathisEdwardsFINAL.pdf
Hi Jack,
That’s an interesting post. I would like to agree with you and Riemer on the belief that certain programs might reduce improper behaviour. However, in my opinion we should not promote that online software controls people in order to ascertain desirable behaviour. Do you really believe that we need software to live in harmony with each other? Besides, don’t you agree that parents are often part of the problem as well?