Cyberbullying is a concern for parents, students, and teachers alike. Once kids go online, the chances that they’ll encounter mean behavior are quite high. In Common Sense’s 2018 study Social Media, Social Life, more than 1 in 10 teen social media users (13 percent) reported having “ever” been cyberbullied, and nearly two-thirds (64 percent) “often” or “sometimes” reported coming across racist, sexist, homophobic, or religious-based hate content in social media.
Lessons on this topic teach students about the effects of digital drama, cyberbullying, and hate speech on both themselves and their larger communities. Students explore how individual actions — negative and positive, intentional and unintentional — can affect their peers and others. They’re encouraged to take the active role of upstander and build positive, supportive online communities, and they will learn how to cultivate empathy, compassion, and courage to combat negative interactions online.