Facebook Teams with Time Warner to Fight Cyberbullies
Categories: Tech
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| Dealing with a bully the old fashioned way |
Facebook, which has 750 million users, announced that it will team up with Time Warner to wage a campaign to stop kids from beating up on each other online. The campaign, dubbed Stop Bullying: Speak Up, is meant to help kids who are teased because of their sexual orientation, fashion tastes, or hobbies. All of this taunting can lead to emotional distress and in some cases, as we have seen over the last year, suicide.
"We believe that by working together with parents and teachers, we can teach young people to speak up and stop bullying," Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, told reporters.
Facebook plans to release a new application that will broadcast a user's pledge to stop bullies -- just in time for school to start. Facebook has already rolled out a feature that makes it easier to report online bullies.
In a 2009 survey conducted by the Associated Press and MTV, half of the people aged 14 to 24 said they had been cyberbullied, according to media outlets.
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