A New Program Scours Twitter for School Bullying
One of the challenges with nipping school bullying in the bud is that students are often reluctant to let teachers and parents know what's going on. Kids think being labeled as a snitch will make their situations worse—if adults don't take bullying seriously, sometimes those fears are well founded. But there's one place students lose their inhibitions and dish all the details of what's going on: Twitter.
Indeed, computer science researchers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison say they've developed a program that scours Twitter for evidence of bullying. That sounds like a daunting task given that 250 million public tweets are sent every day. But the program was able to identify more than 15,000 specific bullying-related