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You know when you're at a cafeteria, you've got your lunch and then you just don't know where to sit? You don't want to sit alone, but you also don't know who would be friendly and let you sit with them. Sixteen-year-old Natalie Hampton has been there. She's an 11th grader from Sherman Oaks, Calif., and the creator of a new app called Sit With Us.

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

You know when you're at a cafeteria and you've got your lunch, and then you just don't know where to sit? You don't want to sit alone, but you also don't know who would be friendly, who might let you sit with them. Well, 16-year-old Natalie Hampton has been there. She's an 11th grader from Sherman Oaks, Calif., and now the creator of a new app called Sit With Us. Natalie Hampton joins us now. Hey there, Natalie.

NATALIE HAMPTON: Hi.

CORNISH: So this is a great idea, but I understand it kind of comes from a sad place, right? I mean, essentially because you had a pretty lonely experience at lunchtime.

HAMPTON: Yeah, I did. At my old school, I was completely ostracized by all of my classmates, and so I had to eat lunch alone every day. When you walk into the lunchroom and you see all the tables of everyone sitting there and you know that going up to them would only end in rejection, you feel extremely alone and extremely isolated, and your stomach drops. And you are searching for a place to eat, but you know that if you sit by yourself, there'll be so much embarrassment that comes with it because people will know and they'll see you as the girl who has nowhere to sit. So there's so many awful feelings that come along with it.

CORNISH: You eventually changed schools, and you did make friends in this new school, but it sounds like you couldn't shake that feeling, right, that experience.

HAMPTON: Well, I felt that if I was thriving in a new school but didn't do anything about the people who feel like this every single day, then I'm just as bad as the people who watched me eat alone. I felt like, with my story, it was my job to stand up and do something about all the kids who feel like this every day. And I wanted to create something that would address bullying, but in a positive way.

CORNISH: So you get this idea for an app, and how did you want it to work?

HAMPTON: The way that it works is it's a free lunch-planning app where kids can find lunch tables if they feel like they have nowhere to go. Pretty much, kids can sign up as ambassadors for a Sit With Us club and agree to post open lunches so that anyone who has the app and has nowhere to go can find a table and hopefully make some new friends.

CORNISH: Now, it seems like the kind of kid who would do that would be the kind of person you could walk up to and say, hey, can I sit with you, so why have an app? Why not the low-tech version, which is just ask to sit down?

HAMPTON: Because the way it was at my old school, I tried many times to reach out to someone, but I was rejected on many times. And you feel like you're labeling yourself as an outcast when you ask to join a table with someone you don't know. This way it's very private. It's through the phone. No one else has to know. And you know that you're not going to be rejected once you get to the table.

CORNISH: So your app launched this week. Have you had a chance to see the app in action just yet?

HAMPTON: So far, the results have been very, very positive. I had my first club meeting the other day, and everyone was very excited. And people are already posting open lunches at my school. So I'm very excited that things are already kicking off with a great start.

CORNISH: Well, Natalie Hampton, thank you so much for speaking with us.

HAMPTON: Thank you so much for having me.

CORNISH: Natalie Hampton - her app is called Sit With Us. She's 16 years old from Sherman Oaks, Calif.

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Teen Creates 'Sit With Us' App For Bullied Kids

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You know when you're at a cafeteria, you've got your lunch and then you just don't know where to sit? You don't want to sit alone, but you also don't know who would be friendly and let you sit with them. Sixteen-year-old Natalie Hampton has been there.

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After Kenneth Weishuhn told classmates at his Iowa high school last winter that he was gay, his family says anonymous voicemail threats began popping up on his cellphone. At school, some of his fellow students yelled anti-gay slurs, and the harassment got so bad that teachers at South O'Brien High School in Paullina, Iowa, began standing guard in hallways. Friends started an online support group for Kenneth, whom they called "K.J." Bullies spammed it, family members say.

On April 15, K.J. hanged himself in the garage of his home in Primghar. He was 14.

K.J.'s suicide generated a rare front-page editorial in the Sioux City Journal, headlined, "We must stop bullying. It starts here. And it starts now." The editorial said bullies' mistreatment of Weishuhn "didn't let up until he took his own life," adding, "We are all to blame. We have not done enough."

Candlelight vigils and rallies for the freshman spread across Iowa, and K.J.'s image served as an onstage backdrop during Madonna's European tour.

Nearly two months later, police are still investigating. O'Brien County Sheriff Michael Anderson said Tuesday that an announcement from the county attorney on whether criminal charges will be filed could come as early as this week.

Tragic suicides such as K.J.'s have galvanized educators into a zero-tolerance stance on bullying, and a recent analysis by the U.S. Department of Education shows that state lawmakers nationwide are increasingly willing to criminalize bullying behavior, even as experts wonder whether doing so will have the intended effect: to curb the behavior and improve the learning atmosphere.

As millions of students head off to their summer breaks, they might leave behind the face-to-face bullying that includes everything from simple taunts to brutal beatings, but too often they can't escape the digital world that gives the predators access to their prey day and night and well beyond the schoolyard gates.

Though bullying is as old as classrooms, only in the past decade or so have states moved to address, legislatively, what once was simply the domain of schools. In 1999, only Georgia had an anti-bullying law. Now every state but Montana does. In the past 13 years, states have enacted nearly 130 anti-bullying measures, half of which came since 2008.

Spurred partly by the Columbine shootings in 1999, in which media accounts suggested the perpetrators had been bullied, states began "rapidly" addressing bullying, a 2011 U.S. Department of Education report found. Eighteen states have laws that allow victims to seek legal remedies for bullying, either from schools that don't act or from the bullies themselves. Among other recent trends:

*32 states require that schools have procedures for investigating bullying incidents.

*17 states require that school staff report bullying to a supervisor, much as they report suspected abuse and neglect.

*Nine states require administrators to report bullying to police.

*11 states require that schools allow anonymous reporting by students of bullying.

Russlynn Ali, the Department of Education's assistant secretary for civil rights, said schools should think hard before turning discipline cases over to police. "It's hugely important to set the (school) culture right and make it safe for all," she said. "That is different from sending children to jail."

Ali said minority students in districts with zero-tolerance policies are frequently punished more severely than other students. She noted new federal data that show that zero-tolerance districts in the 2009-10 school year expelled nearly 30,000 students; 56% were black or Hispanic, though 45% of students enrolled were black or Hispanic.

Even anti-bullying advocates warn that throwing bullies in jail might not be the best remedy. "It's a terrible idea," said Eliza Byard, who heads the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), a national advocacy group that works on improving the climate at the nation's schools. "Locking children up (and) imposing criminal penalties on children represents a tremendous failure on the part of adults."

Yet in state after state, legislators are stepping forward to address what has been called a national epidemic, one that has gained even greater visibility in recent years as singer Lady Gaga, actress Anne Hathaway and scores of other celebrities have helped to elevate the cause.

Chris Hall, an Iowa state lawmaker from Sioux City, proposed legislation last winter that would require both the bully's and the victim's parents to take part in mediation after a bullying report. If the bully's parents refuse to cooperate, prosecutors could pursue fines or criminal charges, though Hall envisions community service, not jail time, for scofflaw parents. Bringing the parents into the process, Hall says, "helps to connect the dots for a child."

The measure died before getting a hearing, but Hall says K.J.'s suicide, which came at the end of the 2012 legislative session, could make a difference going forward. He plans to reintroduce the legislation in January.
The Prince case
Perhaps the most notorious bullying case in recent years took place in South Hadley, Mass., where on Jan. 14, 2010, Phoebe Prince, also a high school freshman, hanged herself from a stairwell in her home. Police concluded that in the three months before her death, a small group of classmates had relentlessly bullied the 15-year-old.

On March 29 of that year, District Attorney Elizabeth Scheibel announced felony criminal indictments against six teens, five of whom were minors. The most serious charge carried a sentence of up to 10 years in prison. Two years later, none of the six has gone to trial. Prosecutors dropped statutory rape charges against one teen, and the other five struck plea deals on lesser misdemeanor charges for probation and community service.

Attorney Richard Cole, a Massachusetts school safety consultant who testified last year before a state commission reviewing bullying laws, said Massachusetts has "enough criminal statutes right now for police or prosecutors" to go after bullies. Massachusetts prosecuted Phoebe's case under civil rights law, but a spate of new legislation in other states forces schools to clamp down on bullies with the help of law enforcement.

Though anti-bullying advocates welcome the attention the issue has been getting, they say much of the new legislation doesn't address the underlying psychological issues behind bullying or fund training for teachers, counselors and administrators on what to do when victims come forward. As a result, they say, schools are unprepared to react, even as victims' expectations for justice rise.

"Criminalizing these behaviors is not going to be the most effective thing to prevent them," said Elizabeth Englander, director of the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center at Bridgewater State University. It's hard to know, she said, whether pursuing criminal charges will prevent bullying or simply "drive the problem underground."

Research shows that children struggling with mental health problems are especially vulnerable to being bullied. Though few would disagree that extreme harassment and intimidation deserve swift punishment, Englander and other experts wonder whether teenagers should be prosecuted if a vulnerable classmate reacts with suicide. "Something in the system fails when children have to resort to extreme violence," she said.

High-profile "bullycide" cases increase the pressure communities feel to punish bullies. An opinion poll conducted in February 2010, weeks after Phoebe's death, found that 61% of Massachusetts voters said school bullying should be a crime.

Byard said sending a bully to jail might seem like the right thing to do, but it's "an easy answer that doesn't work."

She noted that her group's most recent school climate survey in 2009 found that fewer than one in six gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students said teachers or other school staff consistently intervened when homophobic remarks were made in their presence. Criminalizing bullying, she said, is "part of a move to talk only about the individual," not the entire system's response to abusive behavior.

She said states should look to model legislation in Maine, signed last month by Gov. Paul LePage, a Republican, that focuses on prevention and on training for teachers. The state Legislature passed it with wide margins in both the House and Senate. It provides schools with a clear definition of bullying in an attempt to help teachers figure out how to proceed.
What can be done?
Recent federal statistics show that school has never been a safer place but that bullying remains a persistent problem: The U.S. Department of Education's most recent school crime and safety survey showed that from 2005 to 2009, 28% of middle- and high-school students reported having been bullied in school, and 6% said they were victims of cyberbullying, even as the number of students who said they'd been victims of theft or violent crime dropped. About one in 16 students surveyed said he or she was bullied at school "almost every day." Among seventh-graders, nearly one in 10 was bullied every day.

As in many bullying cases, Phoebe's suicide raised questions about how effective her school had been in keeping her safe. In the fall of 2009, Phoebe, a recent immigrant from Ireland, and her mother talked to school counselors about Phoebe's bullying difficulties in Ireland.

Rosalind Wiseman, the author of the 2002 book Queen Bees & Wannabes, a bestseller about teen girls' relationships that was the basis of the movie Mean Girls, said the district attorney in Phoebe's case "chose very carefully" how she charged the teens. "What I wish she had done was hold the adults responsible."

Wiseman met with teens at Phoebe's school after the suicide and found that quite a few "were really jaded" about the case. "Certainly the adults created the culture in which (bullying) was allowed to thrive." A consultant to schools trying to address bullying, Wiseman said students often tell her that administrators turn a blind eye to complaints if eyewitnesses aren't present. She regularly meets parents who "get crazy-angry" because their kids' bullying complaints go unheeded.

"They feel like they're sending their child into a system that's supposed to keep them safe, but it's actually the biggest risk to their child's safety," she said.

Though Phoebe's case didn't send anyone to prison, it had the intended effect, said Cole, the Massachusetts attorney. None of the six students returned to the school. The case "definitely acts as a deterrent to others." Cole and other civil rights experts worry about dragging too many young people into court, but he says, "There absolutely are times when you need to get the criminal justice system involved."

K.J.'s mother, Jeannie Chambers, isn't so sure. Though police and the county prosecutor won't talk about the case, Chambers says she doubts anyone will be charged. In fact, she told police she didn't want anyone going to jail for K.J.'s death. "I just didn't want somebody else's family to suffer," she said Monday.

Four classmates were disciplined for anti-gay bullying directed at K.J. before his death. Chambers said that she believes their behavior directly contributed to his suicide but that the four have already been subjected to withering criticism from classmates. Chambers told police she hoped the students received counseling, not jail time. "I didn't want somebody else to - how do I say it? - go through what my son went through."

Echoing Hall's proposed legislation, Chambers said parents need to be held accountable for their children's hateful behavior. "A lot of people don't understand: These kids learned it from home."

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After Kenneth Weishuhn told classmates at his Iowa high school last winter that he was gay, his family says anonymous voicemail threats began popping up on his cellphone. At school, some of his fellow students yelled anti-gay slurs, and the harassment got so bad that teachers at South O'Brien High School in Paullina, Iowa, began standing guard in hallways.

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Teacher Works to Prevent Bullying as New School Year Begins

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A new school year can bring about bullying and one teacher in New Britain has made it his mission to motivate students to stop the destructive behavior as soon as they see it.

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What's more, the danger of anti-bullying laws, which have now been passed by all but six states, is that they may subtly encourage schools to address this complicated problem quickly and superficially. Many schools are buying expensive anti-bullying curriculum packages, big glossy binders that look reassuring on the bookshelf and technically place schools closer to compliance with the new laws.

But our research on child development makes it clear that there is only one way to truly combat bullying. As an essential part of the school curriculum, we have to teach children how to be good to one another, how to cooperate, how to defend someone who is being picked on and how to stand up for what is right.

To do this, teachers and administrators must first be trained to recognize just how complex children's social interactions really are. Yes, some conflict is a normal part of growing up, and plenty of friendly, responsible children dabble in mean behavior. For these children, a little guidance can go a long way. That is why the noted teacher and author Vivian Paley once made a rule that her students couldn't exclude anyone from their play. It took a lot of effort to make it work, but it had a powerful impact on everyone.

Other children bully because they have emotional and developmental problems, or because they come from abusive families. They require our help more than our punishment.

The kind of bullying, though, that presents the most difficulty in figuring out how and when to intervene falls between these two extremes: Sometimes children who aren't normally bullies get caught up in a larger culture of aggression - say, a clique of preadolescent girls who form a club with the specific function of being mean to other girls. Teachers must learn the difference between various sorts of aggressive behaviors, as well as the approaches that work best for each.

Most important, educators need to make a profound commitment to turn schools into genuine communities. Children need to know that adults consider kindness and collaboration to be every bit as important as algebra and reading. In groups and one-on-one sessions, students and teachers should be having conversations about relationships every day. And, as obvious as it might sound, teachers can't just preach kindness; they need to actually be nice to one another and to their students.

Teachers also need to structure learning activities in which children are interdependent and can learn to view individual differences as unique sources of strength. It's vital that every student, not just the few who sign up for special projects or afterschool activities, be involved in endeavors that draw them together.

Look at Norway, where the prevention of such incidents became a major emphasis of the school system after three teenage victims of bullying committed suicide in 1983. There, everyone gets involved - teachers, janitors and bus drivers are all trained to identify instances of bullying, and taught how to intervene. Teachers regularly talk to one another about how their students interact. Children in every grade participate in weekly classroom discussions about friendship and conflict. Parents are involved in the process from the beginning.

Norway's efforts have been tremendously effective. The incidence of bullying fell by half during the two-year period in which the programs were introduced. Stealing and cheating also declined. And the rate of bullying remains low today. Clearly, when a school and a community adopt values that are rooted in treating others with dignity and respect, children's behavior can change.

Indeed, our analysis of successful bullying-prevention programs across the United States and abroad reveals that the key common factor is their breadth: both in terms of the people who participate and of the deep connection between specific policies and the larger social ethos of the school community.

Involving the legal system makes a strong statement that a society won't tolerate bullying. But for laws like the one in Massachusetts to succeed, they have to be matched by an educational system that teaches children not only what's wrong, but how to do what's right.

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Opinion | There's Only One Way to Stop a Bully

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What's more, the danger of anti-bullying laws, which have now been passed by all but six states, is that they may subtly encourage schools to address this complicated problem quickly and superficially. Many schools are buying expensive anti-bullying curriculum packages, big glossy binders that look reassuring on the bookshelf and technically place schools closer to compliance with the new laws.

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The angst and ire of teenagers is finding new, sometimes dangerous expression online-precipitating threats, fights, and a scourge of harrassment that parents and schools feel powerless to stop. The inside story of how experts at Facebook, computer scientists at MIT, and even members of the hacker collective Anonymous are hunting for solutions to an increasingly tricky problem.

Geoff McFetridge

In the annals of middle-school mischief, the Facebook page Let's Start Drama deserves an entry. The creator of the page-no one knew her name, but everyone was sure she was a girl-had a diabolical knack for sowing conflict among students at Woodrow Wilson Middle School in Middletown, Connecticut. "Drama Queen," as I came to think of her in the months I spent reporting at the school to write a book about bullying, knew exactly how to use the Internet to rile her audience. She hovered over them in cyberspace like a bad fairy, with the power to needle kids into ending friendships and starting feuds and fistfights.

In contrast with some other social networks, like Twitter, Facebook requires its users to sign up with their real names. Drama Queen easily got around this rule, however, by setting up Let's Start Drama with a specially created e-mail address that didn't reveal her identity. Wrapped in her cloak of anonymity, she was free to pass along cruel gossip without personal consequences. She started by posting a few idle rumors, and when that gained her followers, she asked them to send her private messages relaying more gossip, promising not to disclose the source. Which girl had just lost her virginity? Which boy had asked a girl to sext him a nude photo? As Drama Queen posted the tantalizing tidbits she gathered, more kids signed up to follow her exploits-a real-life version of Gossip Girl. She soon had an audience of 500, many drawn from Woodrow Wilson's 750 students, plus a smattering from the local high school and a nearby Catholic school.

Students didn't just message rumors to Drama Queen; they also commented in droves on her posts, from their own real Facebook accounts, or from other fake ones. As one kid wrote about Drama Queen on the Let's Start Drama page, "She just starts mad shit and most of the time so do the ppl who comment."

Drama Queen was particularly ingenious at pitting kids against each other in contests of her own creation. She regularly posted photographs of two girls side by side, with the caption "WHOS PRETTIERRR?!" Below the pictures, commenters would heckle and vote. One such contest drew 109 comments over three days. When it became clear which contestant was losing, that girl wrote that she didn't care: "nt even tryinqq to b funny or smart." The rival who beat her answered, "juss mad you losss ok ppl voted me ! If you really loooked better they wouldve said you but THEY DIDNT sooo sucks for you." This exchange nearly led to blows outside of school, other students told me. And they said a fight did break out between two boys who were featured on Let's Start Drama, in dueling photos, above the caption "Who would win in a fight?" They reportedly ended up pummeling each other off school grounds one day after classes.

Melissa Robinson, who was a social worker for the Middletown Youth Services Bureau, quickly got wind of Let's Start Drama because, she says, "it was causing tons of conflict." Robinson worked out of an office at Woodrow Wilson with Justin Carbonella, the bureau's director, trying to fill gaps in city services to help students stay out of trouble. Their connecting suite of small rooms served as a kind of oasis at the school: the two adults didn't work for the principal, so they could arbitrate conflict without the threat of official discipline. I often saw kids stop by just to talk, and they had a lot to say about the aggression on Let's Start Drama and the way it was spilling over into real life. "We'd go on Facebook to look at the page, and it was pretty egregious," Carbonella told me. Surfing around on Facebook, they found more anonymous voting pages, with names like Middletown Hos, Middletown Trash Talk, and Middletown Too Real. Let's Start Drama had the largest audience, but it had spawned about two dozen imitators.

Carbonella figured that all of these pages had to be breaking Facebook's rules, and he was right. The site has built its brand by holding users to a relatively high standard of decency. "You will not bully, intimidate, or harass any user," Facebook requires people to pledge when they sign up. Users also agree not to fake their identities or to post content that is hateful or pornographic, or that contains nudity or graphic violence. In other words, Facebook does not style itself as the public square, where people can say anything they want, short of libel or slander. It's much more like a mall, where private security guards can throw you out.

Carbonella followed Facebook's procedure for filing a report, clicking through the screens that allow you to complain to the site about content that you think violates a rule. He clicked the bubbles to report bullying and fake identity. And then he waited. And waited. "It felt like putting a note in a bottle and throwing it into the ocean," Carbonella said. "There was no way to know if anyone was out there on the other end. For me, this wasn't a situation where I knew which student was involved and could easily give it to a school guidance counselor. It was completely anonymous, so we really needed Facebook to intervene." But, to Carbonella's frustration, Let's Start Drama stayed up. He filed another report. Like the first one, it seemed to sink to the bottom of the ocean.

Facebook, of course, is the giant among social networks, with more than 1 billion users worldwide. In 2011, Consumer Reports published the results of a survey showing that 20 million users were American kids under the age of 18; in an update the next year, it estimated that 5.6 million were under 13, the eligible age for an account. As a 2011 report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project put it, "Facebook dominates teen social media usage." Ninety-three percent of kids who use social-networking sites have a Facebook account. (Teens and preteens are also signing up in increasing numbers for Twitter-Pew found that 16 percent of 12-to-17-year-olds say they use the site, double the rate from two years earlier.)

Social networking has plenty of upside for kids: it allows them to pursue quirky interests and connect with people they'd have no way of finding otherwise. An online community can be a lifeline if, say, you're a gender-bending 15-year-old in rural Idaho or, for that matter, rural New York. But as Let's Start Drama illustrates, there's lots of ugliness, too. The 2011 Pew report found that 15 percent of social-media users between the ages of 12 and 17 said they'd been harassed online in the previous year. In 2012, Consumer Reports estimated that 800,000 minors on Facebook had been bullied or harassed in the previous year. (Facebook questions the methodology of the magazine's survey; however, the company declined to provide specifics.) In the early days of the Internet, the primary danger to kids seemed to be from predatory adults. But it turns out that the perils adults pose, although they can be devastating, are rare. The far more common problem kids face when they go online comes from other kids: the hum of low-grade hostility, punctuated by truly damaging explosions, that is called cyberbullying.

What can be done about this online cruelty and combat? As parents try, and sometimes fail, to keep track of their kids online, and turn to schools for help, youth advocates like Robinson and Carbonella have begun asking how much responsibility falls on social-networking sites to enforce their own rules against bullying and harassment. What does happen when you file a report with Facebook? And rather than asking the site to delete cruel posts or pages one by one, is there a better strategy, one that stops cyberbullying before it starts? Those questions led me to the Silicon Valley headquarters of Facebook, then to a lab at MIT, and finally (and improbably, I know) to the hacker group Anonymous.

The people at Facebook who decide how to wield the site's power when users complain about content belong to its User Operations teams. The summer after my trips to Woodrow Wilson, I traveled to the company's headquarters and found Dave Willner, the 27-year-old manager of content policy, waiting for me among a cluster of couches, ready to show me the Hate and Harassment Team in action. Its members, who favor sneakers and baseball caps, scroll through the never-ending stream of reports about bullying, harassment, and hate speech. (Other groups that handle reports include the Safety Team, which patrols for suicidal content, child exploitation, and underage users; and the Authenticity Team, which looks into complaints of fake accounts.) Willner was wearing flip-flops, and I liked his blunt, clipped way of speaking. "Bullying is hard," he told me. "It's slippery to define, and it's even harder when it's writing instead of speech. Tone of voice disappears." He gave me an example from a recent report complaining about a status update that said "He got her pregnant." Who was it about? What had the poster intended to communicate? Looking at the words on the screen, Willner had no way to tell.

In an attempt to impose order on a frustratingly subjective universe, User Operations has developed one rule of thumb: if you complain to Facebook that you are being harassed or bullied, the site takes your word for it. "If the content is about you, and you're not famous, we don't try to decide whether it's actually mean," Willner said. "We just take it down."

All other complaints, however, are treated as "third-party reports" that the teams have to do their best to referee. These include reports from parents saying their children are being bullied, or from advocates like Justin Carbonella.

To demonstrate how the harassment team members do their jobs, Willner introduced me to an affable young guy named Nick Sullivan, who had on his desk a sword-carrying Grim Reaper figurine. Sullivan opened the program that he uses for sorting and resolving reports, which is known as the Common Review Tool (a precursor to the tool had a better name: the Wall of Shame).

Sullivan cycled through the complaints with striking speed, deciding with very little deliberation which posts and pictures came down, which stayed up, and what other action, if any, to take. I asked him whether he would ever spend, say, 10 minutes on a particularly vexing report, and Willner raised his eyebrows. "We optimize for half a second," he said. "Your average decision time is a second or two, so 30 seconds would be a really long time." (A Facebook spokesperson said later that the User Operations teams use a process optimized for accuracy, not speed.) That reminded me of Let's Start Drama. Six months after Carbonella sent his reports, the page was still up. I asked why. It hadn't been set up with the user's real name, so wasn't it clearly in violation of Facebook's rules?

After a quick search by Sullivan, the blurry photos I'd seen many times at the top of the Let's Start Drama page appeared on the screen. Sullivan scrolled through some recent "Who's hotter?" comparisons and clicked on the behind-the-scenes history of the page, which the Common Review Tool allowed him to call up. A window opened on the right side of the screen, showing that multiple reports had been made. Sullivan checked to see whether the reports had failed to indicate that Let's Start Drama was administered by a fake user profile. But that wasn't the problem: the bubbles had been clicked correctly. Yet next to this history was a note indicating that future reports about the content would be ignored.

We sat and stared at the screen.

Willner broke the silence. "Someone made a mistake," he said. "This profile should have been disabled." He leaned in and peered at the screen. "Actually, two different reps made the same mistake, two different times."

There was another long pause. Sullivan clicked on Let's Start Drama to delete it.

With millions of reports a week, most processed in seconds-and with 2.5 billion pieces of content posted daily-no wonder complaints like Carbonella's fall through the cracks. A Facebook spokesperson said that the site has been working on solutions to handle the volume of reports, while hiring "thousands of people" (though the company wouldn't discuss the specific roles of these employees) and building tools to address misbehavior in other ways.

One idea is to improve the reporting process for users who spot content they don't like. During my visit, I met with the engineer Arturo Bejar, who'd designed new flows, or sets of responses users get as they file a report. The idea behind this "social reporting" tool was to lay out a path for users to find help in the real world, encouraging them to reach out to people they know and trust-people who might understand the context of a negative post. "Our goal should be to help people solve the underlying problem in the offline world," Bejar said. "Sure, we can take content down and warn the bully, but probably the most important thing is for the target to get the support they need."

After my visit, Bejar started working with social scientists at Berkeley and Yale to further refine these response flows, giving kids new ways to assess and communicate their emotions. The researchers, who include Marc Brackett and Robin Stern of Yale, talked to focus groups of 13- and 14-year-olds and created scripted responses that first push kids to identify the type and intensity of the emotion they're feeling, and then offer follow-up remedies depending on their answers. In January, during a presentation on the latest version of this tool, Stern explained that some of those follow-ups simply encourage reaching out to the person posting the objectionable material-who typically takes down the posts or photos if asked.

Dave Willner told me that Facebook did not yet, however, have an algorithm that could determine at the outset whether a post was meant to harass and disturb-and could perhaps head it off. This is hard. As Willner pointed out, context is everything when it comes to bullying, and context is maddeningly tricky and subjective.

One man looking to create such a tool-one that catches troublesome material before it gets posted-is Henry Lieberman, a computer scientist whose background is in artificial intelligence. In November, I took a trip to Boston to meet him at his office in MIT's Media Lab. Lieberman looked like an older version of the Facebook employees: he was wearing sneakers and a baseball cap over longish gray curls. A couple years ago, a rash of news stories about bullying made him think back to his own misery in middle school, when he was a "fat kid with the nickname Hank the Tank." (This is hard to imagine now, given Lieberman's lean frame, but I took his word for it.) As a computer guy, he wondered whether cyberbullying would wreck social networking for teenagers in the way spam once threatened to kill e‑mail-through sheer overwhelming volume. He looked at the frustrating, sometimes fruitless process for logging complaints, and he could see why even tech-savvy adults like Carbonella would feel at a loss. He was also not impressed by the generic advice often doled out to young victims of cyberbullying. " 'Tell an adult. Don't let it get you down'-it's all too abstract and detached," he told me. "How could you intervene in a way that's more personal and specific, but on a large scale?"

To answer that question, Lieberman and his graduate students started analyzing thousands of YouTube comments on videos dealing with controversial topics, and about 1 million posts provided by the social-networking site Formspring that users or moderators had flagged for bullying. The MIT team's first insight was that bullies aren't particularly creative. Scrolling through the trove of insults, Lieberman and his students found that almost all of them fell under one (or more) of six categories: they were about appearance, intelligence, race, ethnicity, sexuality, or social acceptance and rejection. "People say there are an infinite number of ways to bully, but really, 95 percent of the posts were about those six topics," Lieberman told me.

NowThisNews visits MIT's Media Lab to interview Lieberman about his work.

Focusing accordingly, he and his graduate students built a "commonsense knowledge base" called BullySpace-essentially a repository of words and phrases that could be paired with an algorithm to comb through text and spot bullying situations. Yes, BullySpace can be used to recognize words like fat and slut (and all their text-speak misspellings), but also to determine when the use of common words varies from the norm in a way that suggests they're meant to wound.

Lieberman gave me an example of the potential ambiguity BullySpace could pick up on: "You ate six hamburgers!" On its own, hamburger doesn't flash cyberbullying-the word is neutral. "But the relationship between hamburger and six isn't neutral," Lieberman argued. BullySpace can parse that relationship. To an overweight kid, the message "You ate six hamburgers!" could easily be cruel. In other situations, it could be said with an admiring tone. BullySpace might be able to tell the difference based on context (perhaps by evaluating personal information that social-media users share) and could flag the comment for a human to look at.

BullySpace also relies on stereotypes. For example, to code for anti-gay taunts, Lieberman included in his knowledge base the fact that "Put on a wig and lipstick and be who you really are" is more likely to be an insult if directed at a boy. BullySpace understands that lipstick is more often used by girls; it also recognizes more than 200 other assertions based on stereotypes about gender and sexuality. Lieberman isn't endorsing the stereotypes, of course: he's harnessing them to make BullySpace smarter. Running data sets from the YouTube and Formspring posts through his algorithm, he found that BullySpace caught most of the insults flagged by human testers-about 80 percent. It missed the most indirect taunting, but from Lieberman's point of view, that's okay. At the moment, there's nothing effective in place on the major social networks that screens for bullying before it occurs; a program that flags four out of five abusive posts would be a major advance.

Lieberman is most interested in catching the egregious instances of bullying and conflict that go destructively viral. So another of the tools he has created is a kind of air-traffic-control program for social-networking sites, with a dashboard that could show administrators where in the network an episode of bullying is turning into a pileup, with many users adding to a stream of comments-à la Let's Start Drama. "Sites like Facebook and Formspring aren't interested in every little incident, but they do care about the pileups," Lieberman told me. "For example, the week before prom, every year, you can see a spike in bullying against LGBT kids. With our tool, you can analyze how that spreads-you can make an epidemiological map. And then the social-network site can target its limited resources. They can also trace the outbreak back to its source." Lieberman's dashboard could similarly track the escalation of an assault on one kid to the mounting threat of a gang war. That kind of data could be highly useful to schools and community groups as well as the sites themselves. (Lieberman is leery of seeing his program used in such a way that it would release the kids' names beyond the social networks to real-world authorities, though plenty of teenagers have social-media profiles that are public or semipublic-meaning their behavior is as well.)

I know some principals and guidance counselors who would pay for this kind of information. The question is what to do with it. Lieberman doesn't believe in being heavy-handed. "With spam, okay, you write the program to just automatically delete it," he said. "But with bullying, we're talking about free speech. We don't want to censor kids, or ban them from a site."

More effective, Lieberman thinks, are what he calls "ladders of reflection" (a term he borrowed from the philosopher Donald Schön). Think about the kid who posted "Because he's a fag! ROTFL [rolling on the floor laughing]!!!" What if, when he pushed the button to submit, a box popped up saying "Waiting 60 seconds to post," next to another box that read "I don't want to post" and offered a big X to click on? Or what if the message read "That sounds harsh! Are you sure you want to send that?" Or what if it simply reminded the poster that his comment was about to go to thousands of people?

Although Lieberman has had exploratory conversations about his idea with a few sites, none has yet deployed it. He has a separate project going with MTV, related to its Web and phone app called Over the Line?, which hosts user-submitted stories about questionable behavior, like sexting, and responses to those stories. Lieberman's lab designed an algorithm that sorts the stories and then helps posters find others like them. The idea is that the kids posting will take comfort in having company, and in reading responses to other people's similar struggles.

Lieberman would like to test how his algorithm could connect kids caught up in cyberbullying with guidance targeted to their particular situation. Instead of generic "tell an adult" advice, he'd like the victims of online pummeling to see alerts from social-networking sites designed like the keyword-specific ads Google sells on Gmail-except they would say things like "Wow! That sounds nasty! Click here for help." Clicking would take the victims to a page that's tailored to the problem they're having-the more specific, the better. For example, a girl who is being taunted for posting a suggestive photo (or for refusing to) could read a synthesis of the research on sexual harassment, so she could better understand what it is, and learn about strategies for stopping it. Or a site could direct a kid who is being harassed about his sexuality to resources for starting a Gay-Straight Alliance at his school, since research suggests those groups act as a buffer against bullying and intimidation based on gender and sexuality. With the right support, a site could even use Lieberman's program to offer kids the option of an IM chat with an adult. (Facebook already provides this kind of specific response when a suicidal post is reported. In those instances, the site sends an e-mail to the poster offering the chance to call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline or chat online with one of its experts.)

Lieberman would like to build this content and then determine its effectiveness by asking kids for their feedback. He isn't selling his algorithms or his services. As a university professor, he applies for grants, and then hopes companies like MTV will become sponsors. He's trying to work with companies rather than criticize them. "I don't think they're trying to reflexively avoid responsibility," he told me. "They are conscious of the scale. Anything that involves individual action on their part, multiplied by the number of complaints they get, just isn't feasible for them. And it is a challenging problem. That's where technology could help a little bit. My position is that technology can't solve bullying. This is a people problem. But technology can make a difference, either for the negative or the positive. And we're behind in paying attention to how to make the social-network universe a better place, from a technological standpoint."

Internal findings at Facebook suggest that Lieberman's light touch could indeed do some good. During my visit to Silicon Valley, I learned that the site had moved from wholesale banishment of rule-breakers toward a calibrated combination of warnings and "temporary crippling of the user experience," as one employee put it. After all, if you're banished, you can sign up again with a newly created e-mail address under an assumed name. And you might just get angry rather than absorb the message of deterrence. Instead, Facebook is experimenting with threats and temporary punishments. For example, the Hate and Harassment Team can punish a user for setting up a group to encourage bullying, by barring that person from setting up any other group pages for a month or two. (If the account associated with the offensive group uses a made-up name, then the site's only leverage is to remove the group.) According to an in-house study, 94 percent of users whose content prompted a report had never been reported to the site before. As Dave Willner, the content-policy manager, put it when he told me about the study: "The rate of recidivism is very low."

He explained, in his appealingly blunt way, "What we have over you is that your Facebook profile is of value to you. It's a hostage situation." This didn't surprise me. In the course of my reporting, I'd been asking middle-school and high-school students whether they'd rather be suspended from school or from Facebook, and most of them picked school.

The hacker group Anonymous isn't the first place most parents would want their bullied kids to turn. Launched a decade ago, Anonymous is best known for its vigilante opposition to Internet censorship. The group has defaced or shut down the Web sites of the Syrian Ministry of Defense, the Vatican, the FBI, and the CIA. Its slogan, to the extent a loosely affiliated bunch of hackers with no official leadership can be said to have one, is "When your government shuts down the Internet, shut down your government." Anonymous has also wreaked financial havoc by attacking MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal after they froze payments to the accounts of WikiLeaks, the site started by Julian Assange to publish government secrets.

Since Anonymous is anarchic, the people who answer its call (and use its trademark Guy Fawkes mask in their online photos) speak for themselves rather than represent the group, and protest in all kinds of ways. Some, reportedly, have not been kind to kids. There was the case, for example, of a 15-year-old named McKay Hatch, who started a No Cussing Club in South Pasadena, California. When the concept took off in other cities, a group referring to itself as Anonymous launched a countercampaign, No Cussing Sucks, and posted Hatch's name, photo, and contact information across the Web; he got 22,000 e‑mails over two weeks.

But other people in Anonymous have a Robin Hood bent, and this fall, they rode to the rescue of a 12-year-old girl who'd come in for a torrent of hate on Twitter. Her error was to follow the feed of a 17-year-old boy she didn't know and then stop following him when he posted remarks she found rude. The boy took offense and, with three friends, went after her. The boys threatened to "gang bang" her, and one even told her to kill herself. "I'm gonna take today's anger and channel it into talking shit to this 12 year old girl," one wrote. "Blow up [her Twitter handle] till she deletes her twitter," another one added. The girl lived far from the boys, so she wasn't in physical danger, but she was disturbed enough to seek help online. "I have been told to kill myself alot its scary to think people in the world want you to die :( ," she wrote to another Twitter user who asked me to call her Katherine. "He has deleted some of them he was saying things like do you have a rope? and didnt the bleach work?"

Her pleas reached Katherine in the wake of the suicide of a 15-year-old Canadian girl named Amanda Todd. Before Amanda died, she posted a video of herself on YouTube, in which she silently told her story using note cards she'd written on. Amanda said that a man she'd met online had persuaded her to send him a topless photo, then stalked her and released the photo, causing her misery at school. The video is raw and disturbing, and it moved Katherine and a member of Anonymous with the screen name Ash. "It made me choke up," Ash told me. When Katherine discovered that people were still sending the compromising photo of Amanda around online, she and Ash teamed up to help organize a drive to stop them and report offending users to Twitter, which removes pornographic content appearing on its site.

As Katherine and Ash came across other examples of bullying, like rape jokes and suicide taunts, they found that "Twitter will suspend accounts even if they are not in violation of Twitter rules when simply 1000s of people mass report an account as spam," Katherine explained to me in an e‑mail. A Twitter spokesperson said this was possible (though he added that if spam reports turn out to be false, most accounts soon go back online). Twitter bans direct and specific threats, and it can block IP addresses to prevent users whose accounts are deleted from easily starting new ones. But the site doesn't have an explicit rule against harassment and intimidation like Facebook does.

While monitoring Twitter for other bullying, Katherine found the 12-year-old girl. When Katherine told Ash, he uncovered the boys' real names and figured out that they were high-schoolers in Abilene, Texas. Then he pieced together screenshots of their nasty tweets, along with their names and information about the schools they attended, and released it all in a public outing (called a "dox"). "I am sick of seeing people who think they can get away with breaking someone's confidence and planting seeds of self-hate into someone's head," he wrote to them in the dox. "What gives you the fucking right to attack someone to such a breaking point? If you are vile enough to do so and stupid enough to do so on a public forum, such as a social website, then you should know this ... We will find you and we will highlight your despicable behaviour for all to see."

"I informed them that the damage had been done and there was no going back," he explained to me. "They understood this to be an act by Anonymous when they were then messaged in the hundreds." At first the boys railed against Ash on Twitter, and one played down his involvement, denying that he had ever threatened to rape the girl. But after a while, two of the boys began sending remorseful messages. "For two solid days, every time we logged on, we had another apology from them," Ash said. "You hear a lot of lies and fake apologies, and these guys seemed quite sincere." Katherine thought the boys hadn't understood what impact their tweets would have on the girl receiving them-they hadn't thought of her as a real person. "They were actually shocked," she said. "I'm sure they didn't mean to actually rape a little girl. But she was scared. When they started to understand that, we started talking to them about anti-bullying initiatives they could bring to their schools."

I tried contacting the four boys to ask what they made of their encounter with Anonymous, and I heard back from one of them. He said that at first, he thought the girl's account was fake; then he assumed she wasn't upset, because she didn't block the messages he and the other boys were sending. Then Ash stepped in. "When i found out she was hurt by it i had felt horrible," wrote to me in an e‑mail. "I honestly don't want to put anyone down. i just like to laugh and it was horrible to know just how hurt she was." He also wrote, "It was shocking to see how big [Anonymous was] and what they do."

Ash also e-mailed his catalog of the boys' tweets to their principals and superintendents. I called the school officials and reached Joey Light, the superintendent for one of the districts in Abilene. He said that when Anonymous contacted him, "to be truthful, I didn't know what it was. At first the whole thing seemed sketchy." Along with the e-mails from Ash, Light got an anonymous phone call from a local number urging him to take action against the boys. Light turned over the materials Ash had gathered to the police officer stationed at the district's high school, who established that one of the boys had been a student there.

The officer investigated, and determined that the boy hadn't done anything to cause problems at school. That meant Light couldn't punish him, he said. "I realize bullying takes a lot of forms, but our student couldn't have harmed this girl physically in any way," he continued. "If you can't show a disruption at school, the courts tell us, that's none of our business." Still, Light told me he that he felt appreciative of Anonymous for intervening. "I don't have the technical expertise or the time to keep track of every kid on Facebook or Twitter or whatever," the superintendent said. "It was unusual, sure, but we would have never done anything if they hadn't notified us."

I talked with Ash and Katherine over Skype about a week after their Texas operation. I wanted to know how they'd conceived of the action they'd taken. Were they dispensing rough justice to one batch of heartless kids? Or were they trying to address cyberbullying more broadly, and if so, how?

Ash and Katherine said they'd seen lots of abuse of teenagers on social-networking sites, and most of the time, no adult seemed to know about it or intervene. They didn't blame the kids' parents for being clueless, but once they spotted danger, as they thought they had in this case, they couldn't bear to just stand by. "It sounds harsh to say we're teaching people a lesson, but they need to realize there are consequences for their actions," Ash said.

He and Katherine don't have professional experience working with teenagers, and I'm sure there are educators and parents who'd see them as suspect rather than helpful. But reading through the hate-filled tweets, I couldn't help thinking that justice Anonymous-style is better than no justice at all. In their own way, Ash and Katherine were stepping into the same breach that Henry Lieberman is trying to fill. And while sites like Facebook and Twitter are still working out ways to address harassment comprehensively, I find myself agreeing with Ash that "someone needs to teach these kids to be mindful, and anyone doing that is a good thing."

For Ash and Katherine, this has been the beginning of #OpAntiBully, an operation that has a Twitter account providing resource lists and links to abuse-report forms. Depending on the case, Ash says, between 50 and 1,000 people-some of whom are part of Anonymous and some of whom are outside recruits-can come together to report an abusive user, or bombard him with angry tweets, or offer support to a target. "It's much more refined now," he told me over e‑mail. "Certain people know the targets, and everyone contacts each other via DMs [direct messages]."

In a better online world, it wouldn't be up to Anonymous hackers to swoop in on behalf of vulnerable teenagers. But social networks still present tricky terrain for young people, with traps that other kids spring for them. My own view is that, as parents, we should demand more from these sites, by holding them accountable for enforcing their own rules. After all, collectively, we have consumer power here-along with our kids, we're the site's customers. And as Henry Lieberman's work at MIT demonstrates, it is feasible to take stronger action against cyberbullying. If Facebook and Twitter don't like his solution, surely they have the resources to come up with a few more of their own.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Emily Bazelon is a senior editor at Slate and a Truman Capote fellow at Yale Law School.

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The angst and ire of teenagers is finding new, sometimes dangerous expression online-precipitating threats, fights, and a scourge of harrassment that parents and schools feel powerless to stop. The inside story of how experts at Facebook, computer scientists at MIT, and even members of the hacker collective Anonymous are hunting for solutions to an increasingly tricky problem.