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Advertisers are starting to use their works as anti-bullying places. This can extend the knowledge of how to end bullying and how to respond to being bullied.

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A new anti-bullying campaign draws attention to the difference between how people behave online versus in real life. Credit Credit BBDO New York

Back when most of the United States got online via dial-up modem, Monica S. Lewinsky learned how the anonymity of the internet can prompt people to be crude and cruel in a way they never would be in real life. Now she is trying to help others who find themselves the target of vitriol.

To mark October as National Bullying Prevention Month, Ms. Lewinsky, along with the advertising agency BBDO and her public relations manager Dini von Mueffling, started an online campaign against cyberbullying that promotes the hashtag #clickwithcompassion and a suite of emojis developed to support victims of online harassment.

"I think it's really kind of opening up this conversation around starting to recognize and de-stigmatize the bullying that's happening both online and offline in many areas," Ms. Lewinsky said. "We're seeing it in academia - and, of course, politics."

And Ms. Lewinsky is not alone in her attempts to bring attention to the topic. The advertising industry is deploying its well-honed powers of persuasion against bullies who have made the leap from school playgrounds to social networks. Burger King, for example, recently released an ad that looked at how many customers would stand up for a "bullied" Whopper Jr. compared with a teenager being bullied in one of its restaurants.

"Before there was an internet, bullying was thought of as a schoolyard activity," said Greg Hahn, chief creative officer at BBDO. "Now it's as prevalent in adult interactions. Something happens online where those rules don't apply anymore."

The impetus to take on bullying is not only altruistic. Social media increasingly has made brands the target of rumors, boycotts and other attacks.

"Now that word of mouth and social are playing such a large role, and more and more consumers have figured out how to use social, they can get on their soapbox," said Allen Adamson, a brand strategy consultant. "The angrier they are, the more effective they are online."

As a result, advertisers have a greater sense of what bullied individuals face - and are learning what kind of communication serves to counter it. "I think maybe more brands, more people, more entities are experiencing it," said Heidi Arthur, the Ad Council's head of campaign development.

These insights have helped shape the conversation around bullying in the past few years, said Ross Ellis, the founder of STOMP Out Bullying, a nonprofit that is promoting the first Wednesday in November as "National Block It Out Day," an anti-cyberbullying initiative.

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"The shoot we did was really emotional," Monica S. Lewinsky said of the anti-bullying commercial. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times

Five years ago, the Ad Council spearheaded an anti-bullying campaign that targeted parents; today, it speaks directly to bystanders, both kids and adults. The group has homed in on the language used to characterize harassment and abuse to sharpen the focus on what bullying looks like. It now urges people who witness such behavior to intercede.

"Just saying 'bullying' is fairly broad and speaks to you being on one side of it," Ms. Arthur said. "When you can connect it be back to specific behaviors, you can have more of those 'aha' moments."

Ms. Lewinsky hopes that her work will help. The campaign's flagship video depicts what would happen if internet trolls confronted their targets in public rather than online.

"There's an online disinhibition effect, where people hiding behind anonymity and a screen will tend to depart from their normal persona," she said.

The video depicts confrontations like one woman mocking another's weight in a cafe, a pedestrian accosting two men with homophobic hate speech and a woman being labeled a terrorist. The perpetrators and targets were played by actors, but the stunned responses of passers-by who intervened were unscripted.

"The shoot we did was really emotional, not only for the actors, but also for the crew," Ms. Lewinsky said. "We all had very strong reactions to ones that hit home in different ways."

Mr. Hahn said the hateful comments the actors used were taken verbatim from social media accounts. "Sadly, it was all too easy to find them," he said.

Of course, advertisers were well versed in navigating unacknowledged or buried emotions long before the advent of the internet, which some experts suggest has made the industry uniquely positioned to take on today's trolls. And if the industry can position its clients at the forefront of this conversation, those brands stand to benefit.

"I think advertising is really a reflection of what's going on in the times," said Val DiFebo, the chief executive of Deutsch in New York. "I think the value proposition is really about creating a contact point with your consumer that's meaningful to them beyond the product that you're selling."

Mr. Adamson noted that attempting to fight bullying through advertising will have to rely on some of the time-tested strategies marketers have long used.

"Most brands have always been sold on an emotional basis," Mr. Adamson said. "People buy a coffee because it says something about who they are. The only way to deal with this is to make people emotionally motivated to say something. Ultimately, if they're going to change behavior, it's not about a rational argument."

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: Taking on Bullying With Some Powerful Videos. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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How Do You Stop Bullying? Advertisers Try to Help

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Back when most of the United States got online via dial-up modem, Monica S. Lewinsky learned how the anonymity of the internet can prompt people to be crude and cruel in a way they never would be in real life. Now she is trying to help others who find themselves the target of vitriol.

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This article talks about calling out cyberbullies and that it is harmful towards bullies because it can ruin their life. I do disagree with it and believe that bullies should be called out. They go out of their way to hurt someone, so I will go out of my way to shame a bully.

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How not to do social change.

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When systems are broken, vigilante justice may be rough justice. Credit Credit Ting-Li Wang/The New York Times

A number of months ago, I listened to a podcast that has haunted me since - because it captures something essential about our culture warrior moment. It was from NPR's always excellent "Invisibilia" series and it was about a woman named Emily.

Emily was a member of the hard-core punk music scene in Richmond, Va. One day, when she was nearly 30, she was in a van with her best friend, who was part of a prominent band. They were heading to a gig in Florida when the venue called to cancel their appearance. A woman had accused Emily's best friend of sending her an unwelcome sexually explicit photograph.

His bandmates immediately dismissed her allegations. But inwardly Emily seethed. Upon returning to Richmond, she wrote a Facebook post denouncing her best friend as an abuser. "I disown everything he has done. I do not think it's O.K. ... I believe women."

The post worked. He ended up leaving the band and disappeared from the punk scene. Emily heard rumors that he'd been fired from his job, kicked out of his apartment, had moved to a new city and was not doing well. Emily never spoke with him again.

Meanwhile, she was fronting her own band. But in October 2016, she, too, got called out. In high school, roughly a decade before, someone had posted a nude photo of a female student. Emily replied with an emoji making fun of the girl. This was part of a wider pattern of her high school cyberbullying.

A post denouncing Emily also went viral. She, too, was the object of nationwide group hate. She was banned from the punk scene. She didn't leave the house for what felt like months. Her friends dropped her. She was scared, traumatized and alone. She tried to vanish.

"It's entirely my life," she told "Invisibilia" tearfully. "Like, this is everything to me. And it's all just, like, done and over."

But she accepted the legitimacy of the call-out process. If she was called out it must mean she deserved to be rendered into a nonperson: "I don't know what to think of myself other than, like, I am so sorry. And I do feel like a monster."

The guy who called out Emily is named Herbert. He told "Invisibilia" that calling her out gave him a rush of pleasure, like an orgasm. He was asked if he cared about the pain Emily endured. "No, I don't care," he replied. "I don't care because it's obviously something you deserve, and it's something that's been coming. ... I literally do not care about what happens to you after the situation. I don't care if she's dead, alive, whatever."

When the interviewer, Hanna Rosin, showed skepticism, he revealed that he, too, was a victim. His father beat him throughout his childhood.

In this small story, we see something of the maladies that shape our brutal cultural moment. You see how zealotry is often fueled by people working out their psychological wounds. You see that when denunciation is done through social media, you can destroy people without even knowing them. There's no personal connection that allows apology and forgiveness.

You also see how once you adopt a binary tribal mentality - us/them, punk/non-punk, victim/abuser - you've immediately depersonalized everything. You've reduced complex human beings to simple good versus evil. You've eliminated any sense of proportion. Suddenly there's no distinction between R. Kelly and a high school girl sending a mean emoji.

The podcast gives a glimpse of how cycles of abuse get passed down, one to another. It shows what it's like to live amid a terrifying call-out culture, a vengeful game of moral one-upsmanship in which social annihilation can come any second.

I'm older, so all sorts of historical alarm bells were going off - the way students denounced and effectively murdered their elders for incorrect thought during Mao's Cultural Revolution and in Stalin's Russia.

But the "Invisibilia" episode implicitly suggests that call-outs are how humanity moves forward. Society enforces norms by murdering the bullies who break them. When systems are broken, vigilante justice may be rough justice, but it gets the job done. Prominent anthropologist Richard Wrangham says this is the only way civilization advances that he's witnessed.

Really? Do we really think cycles of cruelty do more to advance civilization than cycles of wisdom and empathy? I'd say civilization moves forward when we embrace rule of law, not when we abandon it. I'd say we no longer gather in coliseums to watch people get eaten by lions because clergy members, philosophers and artists have made us less tolerant of cruelty, not more tolerant.

The problem with the pseudo-realism of the call-out culture is that it is so naïve. Once you adopt binary thinking in which people are categorized as good or evil, once you give random people the power to destroy lives without any process, you have taken a step toward the Rwandan genocide.

Even the quest for justice can turn into barbarism if it is not infused with a quality of mercy, an awareness of human frailty and a path to redemption. The crust of civilization is thinner than you think.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

David Brooks has been a columnist with The Times since 2003. He is the author of "The Road to Character" and the forthcoming book, "The Second Mountain."

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Opinion | The Cruelty of Call-Out Culture

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How not to do social change. A number of months ago, I listened to a podcast that has haunted me since - because it captures something essential about our culture warrior moment. It was from NPR's always excellent "Invisibilia" series and it was about a woman named Emily.

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New technology has been made to filter the harassment in comments on this Instagram thing.

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Instagram, owned by Facebook, is expanding its anti-bullying initiative in an effort to rid the popular social media site of bullies. Credit Credit Chandan Khanna/Agence France-Presse

Instagram said Tuesday it was expanding its online anti-bullying initiative, adding a new filter to weed out comments meant to harass or bully the 800 million users of the popular social media site.

The company said it would review accounts that have a large number of comments filtered out. If those accounts violate Instagram's community guidelines, it will take action, which could include banning them. The new filter will also hide comments attacking a person's appearance or character, and alert Instagram to repeat offenders.

It is the second step in an initiative announced last year to curb offensive comments and rid Instagram of its most malicious members.

"To be clear, we don't tolerate bullying on Instagram," Kevin Systrom, the company's chief executive and co-founder, told Instagram users in a blog post Tuesday. The company will also expand policies to guard against the bullying of young public figures who are often the target of hate-filled messages.

"Protecting our youngest community members is crucial to helping them feel comfortable to express who they are and what they care about," he added.

In a 2017 study conducted by Ditch the Label, an online anti-bullying organization, 71 percent of respondents in the United Kingdom said social media sites did not do enough to combat online bullying. Instagram was of particular note: 42 percent of more than 10,000 people aged 12 to 20 surveyed in the United Kingdom said they had experienced cyberbullying on the site in the previous 12 months.

In March, the model and actress Amber Rose called out cyberbullies for saying her 5-year-old son was gay after she posted videos on Instagram of him opening a gift from the singer Taylor Swift.

It is not only children who are targeted. In November, Drew Barrymore was attacked after she posed with a starfish in a photograph to promote a new lipstick. "It hurt me," she wrote in a follow-up post, which was liked 484,238 times.

Instagram, like other social media sites including Twitter and YouTube, has become an easy place to shame or offend, something the company acknowledged last year. Mr. Systrom addressed it in a blog post then, saying, "Many of you have told us that toxic comments discourage you from enjoying Instagram and expressing yourself freely."

Instagram is using a machine-learning algorithm to detect offenders. Called DeepText, it was built by Facebook, which owns Instagram, and uses artificial intelligence to review words for context and meaning, much as the human brain determines how words are used. (Facebook is holding its annual F8 developer conference this week.) Initially, Instagram had a team of people review and rate comments, sorting them into different categories: bullying, racism or sexual harassment.

"What we are concentrating on is building the tools so people can control their experience on Instagram," said Karina Newton, head for public policy at Instagram. "Those will improve over time."

Instagram's users are expected to follow the site's guidelines, which include being respectful to other community members and not posting photographs of naked bodies.

The company has also embarked on a "kindness" campaign, hosting events to promote inclusion and diversity. "It's been our goal to make it a safe place for self expression and to foster kindness within the community," Mr. Systrom said. "This update is just the next step in our mission to deliver on that promise."

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Instagram said Tuesday it was expanding its online anti-bullying initiative, adding a new filter to weed out comments meant to harass or bully the 800 million users of the popular social media site. The company said it would review accounts that have a large number of comments filtered out.

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This article talks about someone who was attacked by cyberbully's and decided to respond in a different way.

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LENS

Haley Morris-Cafiero saved more than 1,000 negative comments directed toward her and, choosing 30 from various backgrounds, photographed herself costumed like her cyberbullies.

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"Quit looking like a slob. No one cares that you're a fat slob. Just the fact that you're a slob." Credit Credit Haley Morris-Cafiero

It all started eight years ago when Haley Morris-Cafiero was taking self-portraits in Times Square, lost in the clutter, cacophony and crowds - or so she thought.

As she developed her film, she discovered that even in the chaos of the country's busiest street, passers-by had noticed her, and none too kindly. One onlooker had photobombed her with what was it? A glare? A few frames later, another observer had thrown her some side eye. Then another. Was it her weight?

Ms. Morris-Cafiero, a fine art photographer who had been working on a series of self-portraits in public spaces, switched her focus. She decided to photograph herself eating, bending, sitting - just being - in public in order to capture those watching and reacting. The results, which went viral in 2013 when HuffPost and London's Daily Mail ran stories on the project, spoke volumes. Sneers, snickers, sidelong glances and outright stares revealed the reality of walking the world while fat. Not to mention, those judging, mocking and scorning came young and old, from all walks of life.

"Wait Watchers" (published as a monograph, "Watchers," in 2015 by the Magenta Foundation) caught onlookers in the act of looking ugly. In an irony that inspired Ms. Morris-Cafiero's latest project, "The Bully Pulpit," the online comments "Wait Watchers" received were even uglier.

"The Bully Pulpit," both a product of social media and a parody of its worst impulses, is Ms. Morris-Cafiero's response to the tens of thousands of negative remarks she received in emails, blog posts, websites, social media and comments from all over the world. (She has also received positive comments, and people coming to her defense against the bullies.)

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Ms. Morris-Cafiero saved more than 1,000 negative comments and, in a demonstration of how anonymous the internet is not, began tracking them down. She chose 30 from various backgrounds - from a 13-year-old video gamer to a 70-year-old former bodybuilder - based on whether they visually inspired her.

In a series of locations, she photographed herself costumed like her chosen mean commenters. She created grotesque versions of her critics, wearing garish wigs, fake witchy noses and prosthetic, cartoonish muscle suits. Then she overlayed the parodies with text - literally wearing their bullying comments in many cases, on her sleeve or chest, as if she were subtweeting them.

As an indigo-haired tattoo artist inked from her neck to her fingers, she wore her insult like a poster on her left arm: "She's downright strange looking," it reads, going down her shoulder. Then after a decorative dragon figure straddling the elbow, "She's hurting everybody's eyes."

In another, as a young man in white briefs taking a selfie of his (prosthetic) 12-pack abs with a red iPhone in the bathroom mirror, the insult is scrawled like graffiti on the wall behind her: "You're fat and gross your arms make me want to puke."

And so on. Each image is absurd, exaggerated, with insults repurposed - and neutralized - as slogans on T-shirts, neckties and other incongruous places (video game consoles, computer screens, dresses and so on).

"The concept, " she said, "is one where I am trying to outwit bullies by responding in a way they simply cannot delete."

Ms. Morris-Cafiero, who is 42, hadn't planned on devoting so much creative energy to fat-shamers and their ilk, but the subject kept leading her down new paths. After "Wait Watchers" went viral, she found herself pursued as a commentator on issues of anti-fat bias, obesity and cyberbullying. She also became an "Anti-Bullying Workshop" volunteer with Girls Inc., the nonprofit girls' advocacy and educational organization.

A native of Atlanta, she taught photography at the Memphis College of Art for 14 years before moving to Northern Ireland earlier this month to teach photography at the Belfast School of Art at Ulster University. She has been photographing women survivors of sexual assaults, and printing their portraits on stainless steel pillows using the wet collodion process, a technically challenging and expensive proposition. But she is hardly done with "Bully Pulpit."

She wants to exhibit the project all over the world, collaborating with other artists. She also hasn't ruled out more additions to the series.

"Of course I hope the bullies stop bullying everyone," she said, "but I know they won't. Hopefully, they will realize that what they say might be used later for another project."

Images can be seen as part of the Unseen Amsterdam, TJ Boulting gallery, London, until Sept. 23 and the EUQINOM gallery in San Francisco until Oct. 27. Follow @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Haley Morris-Cafiero is on Instagram. You can also find Lens on Facebook and Instagram.

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They Body-Shamed Her Online. Then This Photographer Struck Back.

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LENS Haley Morris-Cafiero saved more than 1,000 negative comments directed toward her and, choosing 30 from various backgrounds, photographed herself costumed like her cyberbullies. It all started eight years ago when Haley Morris-Cafiero was taking self-portraits in Times Square, lost in the clutter, cacophony and crowds - or so she thought.

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This article has some facts to bullying and cyberbullying that people need to know. As well as providing tips to stop cyberbullying

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Cyber-bullying incidents have quadrupled. Most students don't tell their parents.

by Margaret Ross, Kamaron Institute

Approximately half of U.S. students are impacted by traditional bullying each school day. It happens on buses, in the cafeteria, gym, hallways, playground, and in classrooms. The most frequent form bullying takes is words (teasing, taunting, ridiculing, name-calling, and gossip - not blows). This type of bullying happens in the "physical" world and that world has time and space limits. Cyber-bullying is making school days even more painful for many children and some school staff. Bullying in cyberspace is not bound by school hours, school days, or facing the intended bully victim. Unfortunately, the perceived anonymous nature of the internet often insulates the bully from the consequences of their damaging behavior.

As the number of households with Internet access approaches saturation and cell phone ownership expands to the 100 million mark, so do the ways kids bully each other. Cyber-bullying in the form of text messages, emails, photos, website postings can go school-wide in minutes and global in days. Slanderous information sent out into cyberspace is difficult, if not impossible, to expunge. Cyber-bullying often takes the form of cyber gossip, where damaging content is based on whim; not facts, and is posted on social networking sites such as MySpace and FaceBook.

Cyber-Bullying Getting Bigger: Studies indicate that cyber-bullying incidents have quadrupled in five years. A 2000 survey by the Crimes Against Children Research center at the University of New Hampshire reported 6 % of young people had experienced some form of cyber-bullying. In 2005, studies of 1500 Internet-using adolescents found that over one-third had been cyber bulled and half of those admitted to cyber-bullying others (Hinduja and Patchin, In Review.) A 2005 study by National Children's Home Charity revealed that 20% had been cyber-bullying victims. A 2004 survey conducted by i-Safe America of 1556 adolescents found that 42 % had been bullied online.

How Cyber-Bulling Messages Are Communicated:

Text or digital imaging messages sent on cell phones

e-mails

instant messaging

web pages

web logs (blogs),

chat rooms or discussion groups, and

other information communication technologies

Cyber-bullying Perpetrators - It Is A Cycle:

Middle School and High School girls were about twice as likely as boys to display cyber-bullying behaviors in the form of email, text, and chat*

Middle School and High School girls were twice as likely as boys to report receiving email, text messages or chat room messages that teased, taunted, and ridiculed. *

62% said that they had been cyber-bullied by another student at school, and 46% had been cyber-bullied by a friend. **

55% didn't know who had cyber-bullied them.

Only 20% cyber-bullying victims tell their parents about the incident. Victims are most likely to tell a friend (42%).

**(2005, Kowalski et al., Electronic bullying among school-aged children and youth.)

* (2007-2009, Kamaron Institute, School Surveys)

Ten Tips: Parents Cyber-Bullying Preemption

1. Consider installing filtering and blocking software, but understand clearly that proactive parents are the only real deterrent and the best resource for bullying preemption.

2. Keep your home computer(s) in easily viewable places, such as a family room or kitchen.

3. Model the behavior you want to see in your child

4. Talk regularly with your child about on-line activities he or she is involved in.

5. Set firm guidelines for cell phone use and monitor that behavior.

6. Talk specifically about cyber-bullying. Explain that that it is harmful and unacceptable behavior.

7. Outline your expectations for responsible online behavior and clearly explain the consequences for inappropriate behavior. Use the Cyber Positive Character Contract from this Kamaron site

8. Encourage your child to tell you immediately if he or she is a victim of cyber-bullying. Tell your child does not respond to the bully.

9. Stay calm. Plan in advance how you will calmly receive the news that your child is being bullied and the solution steps you will take. You will want the evidence. Tell your child to save the bullying messages or photo.

10. Call your child's school; ask the principal what measurable, bullying preemption, activity-based programs they have in place today. Offer to serve on the group that expands the school's behavior policy to include cyber bullying behavior that disrupts the schools teaching and learning environment. Ask about results.

More tips and tools for parents and teachers are available at the Kamaron Institute Resource Center on this site.

Margaret Ross, president Kamaron Institute ( www.kamaron.org) is a business, relationship, and bullying preemption expert. Ross is a frequently featured guest on America's top radio shows.

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Cyber-bullying incidents have quadrupled. Most students don't tell their parents. by Margaret Ross, Kamaron Institute Approximately half of U.S. students are impacted by traditional bullying each school day. It happens on buses, in the cafeteria, gym, hallways, playground, and in classrooms. The most frequent form bullying takes is words (teasing, taunting, ridiculing, name-calling, and gossip - not blows).

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Cyberbullying from social media has been linked to more depression among teens who use it.

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Cyberbullying on social media is linked to depression in teenagers, according to new research that analyzed multiple studies of the online phenomenon.

Victimization of young people online has received an increasing level of scrutiny, particularly after a series of high-profile suicides of teenagers who were reportedly bullied on various social networks. In 2013, for example, a spate of suicides was linked to the social network Ask.fm, where users can ask each other questions anonymously. The deaths of teens who had been subject to abuse on the site prompted Ask.fm (which was acquired by Ask.com in 2014) to launch new safety efforts. Twitter, likewise, announced plans in April to filter out abusive tweets and suspend bullying users.

Social media use is hugely common among teenagers, said Michele Hamm, a researcher in pediatrics at the University of Alberta, but the health effects of cyberbullying on social media sites is largely unknown. Regular, face-to-face bullying during the teen years may double the risk of depression in adulthood, and bullying's effects can be as bad or worse than child abuse, studies show.

A depressing effect
In the new review, Hamm and her colleagues combed through studies on cyberbullying and social media, finding 36 that investigated the effects of cyberbullying on health in teens ages 12 to 18. Although the studies examined different health outcomes and sometimes defined cyberbullying differently, one finding stood out.

"There were consistent associations between exposure to cyberbullying and increased likelihood of depression," Hamm told Live Science. [ 8 Tips for Parents of Teens with Depression]

The studies covered a variety of social sites, but Facebook was the most common-between 89 percent and 97.5 percent of the teens who used social media had a Facebook account. Seventeen of the 36 studies analyzed looked at how common cyberbullying was, and the researchers found that a median of 23 percent of teens reporting being targeted. About 15 percent reported bullying someone online themselves.

Two studies examined the prevalence of so-called "bully-victims," meaning teens who both bully others and are bullied. Research on offline bullying shows these kids to be most at-risk for mental health problems. One study found that 5.4 percent of teens were bully-victims, while the other reported a prevalence of 11.2 percent.

Safe social media
Despite the well-publicized suicide cases linked to cyberbullying in news reports, Hamm and her colleagues did not find consistent links between being bullied and self-harm across the studies. Nor did they see a consistent link between cyberbullying and anxiety. Some studies found evidence for these links, and others did not.

However, Hamm cautioned, the findings don't mean these links don't exist. The 36 studies used a variety of definitions and health outcomes, and not enough work has been done to confirm or rule out connections between cyberbullying and anxiety or self-harm.

But cyberbullying and depression went hand-in-hand, the researchers report today (June 22) in the journal JAMA Pediatrics. Ten studies examined the link between social media victimization and depression, and all of them found a connection.

Alone, these studies can't prove that the bullying caused the depression - it's possible that depressed teens are more likely to become targets of bullying than their healthier peers. However, Hamm said, one of the 10 studies did follow the teens over time and found that the cyberbullying preceded the teens' depression, hinting at a causal relationship. The research also found that the more cyberbullying a teen experienced, the more severe his or her symptoms of depression.

Alarmingly, teens typically suffered cyberbullying in silence. "Kids really are hesitant to tell anyone when cyberbullying occurs," Hamm said. "There seems to be a common fear that if they tell their parents, for example, they'll lose their Internet access."

Therefore, it's important for parents to respond carefully if their kids are being bullied online, and to teach teens safe Internet use rather than cutting off permission to use the Web, she said.

"Parents need to address that this is happening and that the Internet and social media is here," Hamm said. "It's an important part of their kids' lives. But it needs to be a whole team approach."
Copyright 2015 LiveScience, a Purch company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Social Media Cyber Bullying Linked to Teen Depression

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Victims tend to suffer in silence, making it difficult for parents to identify and address the problem