Pirate's Cove

I think we can all agree that cyber-bullying is a Bad Thing, especially for children, and even young adults. Bullying is a sad, and unfortunate, fact of life since time immortal. Cyber-bullying has also become a sad and unfortunate fact of life. So, what to do about it?

Cyberbullying: Rutgers University Awarded Grant to Develop New Cyberbullying Detection Methods

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a grant to Rutgers University to develop a system of “automatic detection” of cyberbullying. Rutgers University has received $117,102 in funding so far for its project. According to the grant, 40 percent of American teenagers have reported being the victims of cyberbullying.

“This is especially worrying as the multiple studies have reported that the victims of cyberbullying often deal with psychiatric and psychosomatic disorders,” the grant states. “Specifically, this research will advance the state of the art in cyberbullying detection beyond textual analysis by also giving due attention to the social relationships in which these bullying messages are exchanged. A higher accuracy at detection would allow for better mitigation of the cyberbullying phenomenon and may help improve the lives of thousands of victims who are cyberbullied each year.”

Learning more about it and the methods that occur in order to help kids is a Good Thing. Here’s where this starts running off the rails

The project will used text mining – searching for keywords – as well as other methods of analyzing the relationships between the adolescents who send and receive hurtful cyber messages. The grant language suggests that the researchers understand that research needs to go deeper and will hopefully be used to detect cyberbullying before it begins.

“By analyzing the social relationship graph between users and deriving features such as number of friends, network embeddedness, and relationship centrality, the project will validate (and potentially refine) multiple theories in social science literature and assimilate those findings to create better cyberbullying detectors,” the grant states. “The project will yield new, comprehensive models and algorithms that can be used for cyberbullying detection in automated settings.”

In other words, this will be a massive data mining initiative that delves deep into the lives of private citizens.

(Washington Free Beacon) Vivek K. Singh, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University, is leading the project.

“I have worked on multiple projects including designing a novel media sharing application, detecting patterns in large scale Twitter feeds, and analyzing community behavior in social media to design mechanisms to ‘nudge’ people into suitable behaviors,” he writes on his website.

Suitable behaviors as defined by whom? How will they define it? What methods will they use to “nudge” behavior? And, how will this be applied as “mission creep” creeps in? I’m sure Liberals will be A-OK with all this, but, will you be good with it if, say, a Republican administration, decides to use these methods to go after liberals online? As the saying goes “be careful what you wish for: you may get it.”