Cyberbullying may soon become history

Scientists, including one of Indian origin, have developed a new technique that can spot nasty personal attacks by cyberbullies on social media and alert parents or network administrators when abuse has occurred.

The approach developed by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder in the US, uses five times less computing resources than existing tools. That is efficient enough to monitor a network the size of Instagram for a modest investment in server power, said Richard Han, an associate professor at UC Boulder.

“The response of the social media networks to fake news has recently started to uptick, even though it took grave consequences to reach that point. The response needs to be just as strong for cyberbullying,” said Han.

The group also released a free Android app called BullyAlert that allows parents to receive alerts when their kids are the objects of bullying on Instagram. To build their toolbox, the researchers first employed humans to teach a computer programme how to separate benign online comments from abuse. Next, they designed a system that works a bit like hospital triage. When a user uploads a new post, the group’s tools make a quick scan of the comments.

If those comments look questionable, then that post gets high priority to receive further checks. However, if the comments all seem charitable, then the system bumps the post to the bottom of its queue.