Reword Launch

Background

Bullying has moved from schoolyards to social media. Around the world, cyberbullying was quickly becoming one of society's most serious problems, creating millions of victims.

To try to stop bullying, the focus was always on reporting it after it happened. But there was nothing to protect children from it happening in the first place, and leading social media platforms had failed to introduce effective measures to combat online trolling behaviour.

For Headspace, Australia's largest youth mental health foundation, the task was to find an innovative way to effect real change in the online environment.

Idea

Reword was a real-time alert for online bullying, designed around two insights.

1. Stop bullying before it happened.

2. Create an educational tool to help develop children's moral compass.

Based on a simple JavaScript tool that integrated with social and messaging platforms, Reword used a custom lexicon database to identify strings of words that formed millions of potential insult combinations. As a child typed, the system identified and scanned for insulting phrases and bullying sentiment, not just swearing. When a pattern was found, the child writing the message was alerted with a red strikethrough, instantly interrupting behaviour and prompting them to reconsider their words. If they didn't bully, then the red line never appeared.

Reword was made available online as a free Google Chrome extension and children were invited to become co-authors by adding their own bullying terms, helping Reword recognise evolving language and slang.

An in-school program was launched with an integrated campaign featuring real kids designed to engage parents and educators emotionally, calling on them to install the tool at home and in schools.

Young people were targeted via the in-school program and social media, inviting them to directly interact with the tool and contribute new insults.

Results

The first six weeks showed distinct impact on behaviour: 84% of insults detected were reworded. Bullying behaviour per user dropped an incredible 67%.

In the same period, Reword was introduced to over 260 schools nationwide and installed on more than 150,000 computers.

Over 20,000 insult submissions were made, creating millions of new combinations.

The campaign attracted global media coverage and with the support of local and federal government was expanded to a mobile application.

Headspace committed to implementing Reword in every school nationwide.

Our Thoughts

A lot of people are spooked by the very concept of Artificial Intelligence but here it is at work, technology creating a programme that has learned to recognise bullying language and issue a clear warning to the abusers.

The hidden message to trolls is, you're not anonymous. Perhaps it's fear as much as guilt that then gets them to delete or alter the message.

This is the most significant idea in this issue of Directory. There have been countless campaigns trying to deal with the sheer nastiness of some young people when they are online. This is the first one that looks as if it actually can change behaviour.