BullyBlocker: Towards the Identification of Cyberbullying in Social Networking Sites

Cyberbullying is the deliberate use of online digital media to communicate false, embarrassing, or hostile information about another person. It is the most common online risk for adolescents and well over half of young people do not tell their parents when it occurs. While there have been many studies about the nature and prevalence of cyberbullying, there has been relatively less work in the area of automated identification of cyberbullying in social media sites. The focus of our work is to develop an automated model to identify and measure the degree of cyberbullying in social networking sites, and a Facebook app for parents, built on this model, that notifies them when cyberbullying occurs. This paper describes the challenges associated with building a computer model for cyberbullying identification, presents key results from psychology research that can be used in such a model, describes an initial model and mobile app design for cyberbullying identification, and describes key areas of future work to improve upon the initial model.