Cyberbullies Update - Criminal Action Against Students Suspected of Bullying Pheobe Prince

I first wrote about the suicide of 15 year-old Phoebe Prince in my little New England town of South Hadley, MA on February 1 in a post titled Cyberbullies. I know this terrible story has hit national and local news around the world - if you haven't seen details - here's an update from a local article at MassLive.com:

Northwestern District Attorney Elizabeth D. Scheibel Monday announced the indictments of six teenagers accused of having bullied Phoebe so severely September through January that she hanged herself Jan. 14.

The district attorney also said she has taken out complaints in Hampshire-Franklin Juvenile Court against three female juveniles in the matter.

Charges in the indictments range from statutory rape to stalking and civil rights violations in the harassment of Phoebe, a resident of Ireland who moved to town in the fall and enrolled in South Hadley High School as a ninth grader.

On Monday, District Attorney Scheibel provided an account of Phoebe’s final hours:

On the last day of her life, Phoebe N. Prince was harassed in the South Hadley High School library during lunch period, harassed in the school hallway as the final bell rang and harassed as she walked home along Newton Street.

The 15-year-old sophomore finally made it home to 356 Newton St. and, sometime between 2:48 and 4:30 p.m. on Jan. 14, ended more than four months of relentless bullying by hanging herself in the stairwell leading to her family’s second-floor apartment. She was still wearing the clothes she wore to school.

Pheobe's little sister found her hanging in that stairwell when she came home from school.

Here's more from Scheibel:

Three individuals – a male and two females – were involved in assaultive behavior against Prince on that last day, motivated by the group’s displeasure with Phoebe’s brief dating relationship with the male student.

Amid the details of names and charges, Scheibel painted a scenario in which Prince went through daily hell at school for months while most of the student body, along with some faculty and administrators, knew what was happening but failed to act.

The investigation revealed relentless activity directed toward Phoebe, designed to humiliate her and to make it impossible for her to remain at school.

The bullying, for her, became intolerable.

Amazingly - according to Scheibel - Facebook and Craigslist have been little help:

A significant obstacle and delay for investigators in this case has been the inexplicable lack of cooperation from Internet service providers.... in particular, Facebook and Craigslist.

There are also still some very serious (non-criminal according to the DA) issues to be dealt with by this town including the faculty and administrators who are alleged to have known what was happening to Phoebe but failed to act.

Cyberbullying And Electronic Fingerprints

In my last post I discussed a very upsetting story in my town - South Hadley, Massachusetts. On January 14, fifteen year Phoebe Prince apparently committed suicide after being bullied - in school, after school and online. The cyberbullying has even continued after here death, most notably on Facebook. There's been a lot of traffic on that post - here's an update.

Last night there was a Selectboard meeting in South Hadley and people were given the opportunity to publicly comment as part of the meeting format. I did not attend tot meeting but watched the live feed on the town cable access channel. A number of parents got up and described how their children had been treated. Here's a short video clip from the meeting posted in a Masslive.com article

South Hadley selectboard meeting becomes a forum bullying discussion

I believe an entire meeting video recording will be posted soon on the South Hadley Community Television site. Also - here's a few quotes from that same MassLive.com article.

What people wanted to know in particular was what discipline has been handed down by South Hadley High School to the so-called “mean girls” believed to have bullied 15-year-old Phoebe Prince, who was found dead at home of an apparent suicide on the afternoon of Jan. 14.

South Hadley High School principal Daniel T. Smith has his own investigation running parallel to the one by local police working with the Northwestern District Attorney’s Office. So far, Smith has said two students were disciplined before Prince’s death and a third was disciplined stemming from an assault on another student after Prince died. School officials have refused to say what the discipline consisted of, citing legal and privacy rights of the students.

Prior to the start of the meeting, a female classmate of Prince said she is disturbed that the students believed to have bullied Prince are still in school. “I’m concerned about what is going to happen in this,” said the girl who declined to give her name. “I think they should get punished, and it should happen soon. Nothing really happened to them.”

And, our police chief also spoke at the meeting. Here's a couple quotes from a WBZTV article:

Police Chief David Labrie says they have interviewed numerous people in their investigation. He says they are closer to the end of the case than the beginning.

"We've subpoenaed records from Facebook, we've subpoenaed web pages from Facebook, hoping to track down the perpetrators of some of these criminal threatening acts."

Without getting technical - this information is backed up and logged by providers like Facebook, Verizon and Comcast. All postings, text messages, tweets, etc are available and identified with either an Internet Protocol (IP) address or cell phone number of the posting source. With applications like Facebook there is even more - in addition to your IP address your username is also logged. Once you hit that Send/OK/Upload/etc button it's out there.

With the proper subpoenas authorities can access all of it - source identification, text, pictures, who posted what, when it was posted, when and if it got removed, what got removed, comments, etc, etc, etc.

It's all there - electronic fingerprints.

Cyberbullies

I'd like to thank Karl Kapp and Tony O'Driscoll for including my blog in the Blog Book Tour for Learning in 3D: Adding a New Dimension to Enterprise Learning and Collaboration.

Karl and Tony's book uses a combination of case studies, conceptual models, and input from dozens of industry experts to provide practical, research-based recommendations and techniques for integrating existing training, business, and computer systems into productive 3D virtual work environments. Up until yesterday my intention had been to give an update of an earlier book blog tour post I wrote on September 26, 2007 and titled Broadband Gaming in the Sticks. In that post I looked at broadband access and availability in the United States - critical for 3D learners and the applications and methods Karl and Tony discuss in their new book.

As far as broadband goes - things have not got much better since 2007 in most of the rural communities in our country - in many places I would argue access today is worse than it was in September 2007. Important stuff but I'm going to save that post for another day.

Why did I change my mind? I live in South Hadley, Massachusetts, a small New England town where things are typically pretty quiet. On January 14, Phoebe Prince, a fifteen year old ninth grader was found dead in my town - an apparent suicide. She had moved here from Ireland last year with her family and has been described by the parent of a friend as the new girl in school. ... a very pretty girl, very sweet, a smart girl. She had been bullied in school, after school and online.

Unbelievably, the online cyberbullying has continued after her death. On Saturday January 30 (16 days after her death) NBC affiliate WWLP published a story titled Online groups bully Phoebe in death. Here's a couple of quotes from that story:

A recent Facebook group formed in the wake of the student's suicide is raising eyebrows. It's called, "We murdered Phoebe Prince". The latest attack group has classmates seemingly boasting about driving the Irish girl to death earlier this month.

Horrible, hate filled messages continue to plague pages dedicated to the freshman's death. Parents are calling for greater accountability by officials.

You may have caught the story nationally broadcast on Good Morning America January 28. Here's the GMA video - I encourage you to watch all 5 minutes and 41 seconds of it if you have not seen it. Show it to your kids.

Now, back to Karl and Tony's book - I'm a huge online, social media, ubiquitous connectivity, 24/7, crank the bandwidth to 11 advocate. Keeping up with the web and all of its applications and connections is critical for individual success and the long term success of our country. Mark Zuckerburg, CEO of Facebook, is referenced in the book suggesting that communication should not be viewed as a way for people to get information. Instead, he proposes that information is a mechanism to foster better communication between people. As students, parents, teachers, coaches, administrators, professors, adults...... it is crucial to remember better communication can be used in both positive and negative ways.

Using technology in our classrooms in appropriate and productive ways has the potential to help us all learn and also has the potential to lay down some usage guidelines and experience that can be applied outside the classroom. Karl and Tony's book helps us understand how we can better do this. It also helps us better understand what our students and kids are doing. I believe every teacher, trainer, professor and academic should read it. Let's learn to use this stuff in positive ways with our students.

I'll write about rural broadband some other time. Today - Peace to Phoebe, her family, her friends, her enemies and this small New England town.

*****

You can check out the web site for the book Learning in 3D and read Chapter One of Karl and Tony's book to get a sense of what the book is about. You can also become a fan on Learning in 3D's Facebook Page.

To learn more about cyberbullying, see Attorney Parry Aftab and the Wired Safety Group's website stopcyberbullying.com

Social Media in Western Mass - Online Impact 2010

On Thursday we hosted Online Impact 2010 in the Technology Park at Springfield Technical Community College (STCC). This was the second Online Impact event held at STCC - we had the first one in June 2009. Both events focused on the use of social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to reach out to customers and prospects. We had an excellent half-day of panels and workshop sessions that focused on social media tips and tactics - here's a list of the workshops along with the presenters:

Twitter and Blogging 101 - Gordon F Snyder Jr (my session!), National Center for Information and Communications Technologies (ICT Center) at STCC
LinkedIn 101: Getting Started & Avoiding Mistakes Tom Lewis, NeedleMine
Integrating Social Media into Your Website Jason Turcotte, Turcotte Design
LinkedIn 201: LinkedIn for Busy Professionals - Getting Results in 10 Minutes/Day Christine Pilch, Grow My Company
Market like the big brands do: How to build a Facebook Fan Page for your local business Mary Fallon and Amanda Gauthier, Garvey Communication Associates, Inc.
Twitter: Where's the ROI? Morriss Partee, Everything CU
The YouTube Effect: What you need to know about online video and the future of the Internet Dave Sweeney, The Communications Department
If We Can Do It, So Can You: Using Social Media in Organizations of All Shapes and Sizes Brad Blake, Director of New Media and Online Strategy, Massachusetts Office of the Governor and David Cavell, Communications and Speechwriter, Massachusetts Office of the Governor
Social Media in Education: An Education Essential Kelly Galanis, Westfield State College
Becoming A Digital Bigfoot: Five quick moves to enhance your digital footprint and gain a competitive advantage! John Garvey, Garvey Communication Associates, Inc.

We also ran a couple of great panels, both moderated by Dave Sweeney from The Communications Department:

Panel 1: Social Media from the Front Lines

Ed Carroll – WGGB abc40
Craig Swimm – WMAS 94.7
Kelly Galanis – Westfield State College
Gordon Snyder – National Center for Information and Communications Technologies (ICT Center) at STCC

Panel 2: Integration

John Garvey – Garvey Communication Associates
Tom Lewis – NeedleMine
Morriss Partee – Everything CU
Christine Pilch – Grow My Company

We had 90 attendees with over 25 people on the waiting list. The event - presenters, attendees, facilities - all excellent. Kelly Galanis (aka RedHeadedDivaK on Twitter) has put up a nice video shot by WGGB on YouTube:

Special thanks to Dave Sweeney from The Communications Department and John Garvey from Garvey Communications for their efforts in setting this up and also special thanks to STCC President (and blogger) Ira Rubenzahl for allowing us to host this event at the College.

With my work I get around the country fairly frequently and have to say - there is some of the strongest excitement, knowledge, experience, dedication and commitment I’ve experienced right here in Western Massachusetts. This event certainly strengthened these impressions. A great day with great people - Western Massachusetts is a very special place to live and work.

We're looking forward to the next Online Impact event!!

Impressions: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the Iranian Revolution

Saturday, June 20, 2009, was a fairly typical day for me. The only thing different than most Saturdays was we woke up early and dropped my daughter off at the airport for a graduation gift trip with her friends. On the way home my wife, younger daughter and I decided to stop at the mall and have the Apple store take a look at my daughter's busted power button on her iPod touch. We made a reservation at the Apple Genius Bar and ended up with about an hour and a half to kill walking around the mall. My wife and daughter ended up doing most of the shopping and I ended up peeking at my Twitter feed on my iPhone. I noticed a lot of tweets tagged #iranelection and decided to start following those tags.

Like tens of thousands of others for the rest of the day I watched a revolution tweet by tweet - described in 140 characters or less on Twitter. The Iranian government had pretty much shut down traditional media (television feeds, reporters, etc) but that did not matter - they could not shut down the web. As Secretary of Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, the Iranian government "could not draw the net tight enough to stop everything" It was evident when I got home and turned on the TV - guess where the major networks (CNN, Fox, etc) were getting their updates on Saturday - Twitter, Facebook, YouTube......

The ability to read, watch and experience through the eyes of others what was happening in real time was something I had never experienced before. The closest think I can compare it to was was it felt like like watching a live battle - not through the eyes and interpretation of a reporter or camera person - but through the tweets of the individual soldiers.

For the past few days there are reports the Iran government has been confiscating laptops, cell phones, etc and analyzing historical information on the devices. It is very simple to pull historical information off cell phone SIM cards (for example) and they will be able to track down some of the posters this way. It has also been reported the government is taking a close look at those videos on YouTube and will be identifying some of the protesters this way too. There are also reports of looking at things like Twitter names and tracing IP addresses to ID people. There also may have been a counter attack using social media, hacking Moussavi's Facebook page and posting incorrect information to confuse and upset his supporters.

What can be done? Not much without shutting the entire country down from the rest of the world. I'm guessing tsomeone is taking a serious look at cell phone signal jammers that could shut down cellular communications when things start to get out of control. Sure things can be shut down temporarily but a jammer is not going to stop a user from tweeting or recording video and then posting the content when they do get a connection. It will be very difficult to shut this stuff down for extended periods of time.

So many really smart people have told me they just don't get social media apps like Twitter and I struggle sometimes describing why and how I use them. I'm hoping a lot of people are getting it a little more after the past weekend. Saturday will stick with me and I'll remember it in a way that I remember the first time I saw a color television, used a modem, sent an email and searched the web.

Twitter Revisited: Shark Jumping, Apps and Metrics Podcast

On Sunday, Mike Qaissaunee and I recorded a 36 minute and 40 second podcast onTwitter applications, shark jumping and metrics.

Listen to it directly in your web browser by clicking here.

If you have iTunes installed you can subscribe to our podcasts by clicking here.

Here's the intro and list of questions asked during the podcast:

Intro: Twitter has become a household word for many of us - just like Google , YouTube , MySpace and Facebook (among others) have in the past. Chris Brogan (in this video) even calls Twitter his "central nervous system". We first podcast on Twitter almost two years ago. In this podcast we take an updated look at Twitter.

Two years is a long time ago it seems. Probably one of the biggest things in my arsenal is my iPhone today. Two years ago the iPhone did not exist. What's changed in two years with Twitter?

What are some of your favorite apps?

What's up with all this Twitter following - how should we be handling?

I've been hearing the term "jump the shark" recently when some discuss Twitter. What does that mean?

I notice a lot of business people using Twitter, maybe it has jumped the shark. What are they doing? How are business people using it?

So, lots of people seem to be giving Twitter a try but how do we know who has actually drank the kool-aid and has become a daily Twitter user?

Before we talk about numbers, The Influential Marketing Blog has put together something called the 5 stages of Twitter Acceptance.

We talk a lot about impact when it comes to grants - can you explain what that means?

So, what's the interest in things like Twitter?

What are some Twitter measurement tools?

We've come across a couple of tools that attempt to measureTwitter - a web-based application called Twitter Grader and another called Twinfluence .

Twitter Grader is interesting but there is not a lot of detail. Can you discuss Twinfluence?

Didn't Twinfluence at one time try to measure efficiency?

So, Twinfluence attempts to measure more things. How does it compare to Twitter Grader?

What about spam?

So, what did this guy do?

How do metrics applications handle these spammers?

What can be done to prevent Twitter manipulation?

Are there any other Twitter based applications we should be looking at?

We should see applications like these improve?

So, has Twitter jumped the shark yet?

Here's how you can get the answers:

To read show notes and listen to Mike Q and my 36 minute and 40 second podcast titled Twitter Revisited: Shark Jumping, Apps and Metrics, click here .

How Do Twitter, Google And Facebook Compare?

This video from Rocketboom provides an interesting perspective.

Twitter-Metrics

Twitter has become a household word for many of us - just like Google , YouTube , MySpace and Facebook (among others) have in the past. Lately I've noticed lots of people following my Twitter feed and I've been careful to follow back unless the feed looks like it's been robot-generated, is pornographic, etc. The result is - I follow lots of people and they follow me back..... keep it real and keep it clean and I will follow. Post something inappropriate and no more follow for you!

Part of our NSF Center work is to determine impact - if we create something, produce something or post/share something we look for answers to questions like:

- How many people looked at it?
- How many people used it?
- If they used it how did they use it?
etc....

For example, let's say Mike Q posts a series of classroom ready presentations on wireless security on the web. We'll look for answers to questions like how the curriculum materials are being used, modified, and adapted to individual classrooms, and how the teaching and learning methods are impacting faculty and students. This level of measurement usually comes from observations, interviews, and focus groups all looking at the changes in the actions and activities of instructors, students, and ultimately workforce and industry. The term we commonly use when referring to these kinds of measurements is metrics .

I'm particularly interested in Twitter because it has the potential to have tremendous impact without some of the tedious one-on-one type of measurement a lot of us are doing now. I've come across a couple of tools that attempt to do some Twitter measuring - a web-based application called Twitter Grader and another called Twinfluence . Let's take a look at both.

Twitter Grader
Twitter Grader ranks Twitters on a percentage scale - looking at the screen shot below (Click it to enlarge) you can see I'm currently ranked at 99.7%.


This ranking, according to Simon Salt, is based on the number of followers you have, the power of this network of followers, the pace of your updates, the completeness of your profile and “a few other factors.”

Twinfluence
Twinfluence goes a little deeper than Twitter Grader , and according to their website, attempts to measure the following:

First and Second Order Networks: From the perspective of graph theory, a Twitterer's followers would be considered their first-order network, and their "followers count" the same as their "degree". "Degree" is a simple form of centrality measurement that equates to "prestige" or "popularitiy"; different types of centrality can measure connectivity, authority, and control in a network.

Reach: Reach is the number of followers a Twitterer has (first-order followers), plus all of their followers (second-order followers). This is by necessity a crude maximum estimate, since there will definitely be duplicates and overlaps that could only be eliminated by up to thousands of API calls. Reach is a measurement of potential audience and listeners, a best estimate of the number of people that a given Twitterer could quickly get a message to.

Velocity: Velocity merely averages the number of first- and second-order followers attracted per day since the Twitterer first established their account. The larger the number is, the faster that Twitterer has accumulated their influence. Of course, this number could jump significantly with the addition of a few high-profile followers. Velocity is scored from "very slow" to "very fast" relative to other twitterers at your network size.

Social Capital: Indicates the average first-order network of a Twitterer's followers. It's essentially a measure of how influential are a twitterer's followers. A high value indicates that most of that Twitterer's followers have a lot of followers themselves. Social Capital is scored from "very low" to "very high" relative to other twitterers at your network size.

Centralization: This is a measure of how much a Twitterer's influence (reach) is invested in a small number of followers. Centralization scores range from 0% (completely decentralized) to a theoretical 100% (completely dependent on one Twitterer). In social network analysis, a high centralization indicates dependency of the network on just a few nodes to maintain the connectivity of the entire network. Twitterers with low centrality networks would not have their reach greatly reduced if a few high-profile people stopped following them. Centralization is scored from "very fragile" to "very resilient" relative to other twitterers at your network size, implying that a network with only a few high-profile followers is very sensitive to collapsing if those followers leave. Conversely, a network with low centralization is not very dependent upon any few followers for its collective reach.

At one time Twinfluence was attempting to measure efficiency. After discussions with some other social media experts, they decided that the idea of twitter efficiency is an interesting one, but there really isn't any way to effectively measure behavior in the context of how a twitterer actually keeps on top of their tweetstream.

So.... using Twinfluence , what kind of impact do my tweets have using their metrics? Here's another clickable screen shot (note - Twininfluence appears to lag in updates so it is not seeing the same number of follows as Twitter Grader):

Twinfluence ranks me around 98% (similar to Twitter Grader ) with 2,315 followers and 6,556,780 second order followers. I'm not sure how significant the numbers are but...... if I can post something and have it potentially reach even one-tenth of a percent (6,500) of those 6.5 million second order users I'm really liking that possible/potential impact!

I'm hoping applications like Twitter Grader and Twinfluence continue to improve and provide additional and more detailed metrics. This is good stuff.

Tamar Weinberg on Facebook Etiquette

Tamar Weinberg has an excellent post over at Techipedia titled The Ultimate Social Media Etiquette Handbook. In her post Tamar discusses a number of social media utilities including a couple of my favorites - Facebook and Twitter. Here's are some Facebook egregious sins that you must not perform on social media sites. Tamar says avoiding these violations will help you learn how to manage and maintain online relationships on a variety of popular social media sites.

• Adding users as friends without proper introductions. If you’re looking to make friends, tell people who you are. Don’t assume they know you — especially if they, well, don’t.
• Abuse application invites and consistently invite friends to participate in vampire games. Many call this spam.
• Abusing group invites. If your friends are interested, they’ll likely join without your “encouragement.” And if they don’t accept, don’t send the group request more than once by asking them to join via email, wall post, or Facebook message.
• Turning your Facebook profile photo into a pitch so that you can gather leads through your Facebook connections. Thanks, but no thanks. Facebook is about real friendships and not about business — at least not to me.
• Using a fake name as your Facebook name. I can’t tell you how many people have added me and their last name is “Com” or “Seo.” I’m not adding you unless you can be honest about who you are. Once upon a time, Facebook deleted all of the accounts that portrayed people as business entities or things. I wish Facebook would employ the same tactics yet again, because I’m not adding a fake identity as a friend.
• Publicizing a private conversation on a wall post. In case it isn’t obvious, Facebook wall posts are completely public to all your friends (unless you tweak your privacy settings). Private matters should be handled privately: via email or even in Facebook private messages.
• Tagging individuals in unflattering pictures that may end up costing your friends their jobs. Avoid the unnecessary commentary also, especially on your childhood pictures that portray your tagged friends as chubby and not so popular. Further, if your friends request to be untagged, don’t make a stink of it.

Good advice, especially to those just starting out with Facebook. Be sure to read Tamar's entire post linked here.

Some Interesting Facebook Statistics

Facebook keeps track of some interesting information on their statistics page:

• More than 140 million active users
• More than half of Facebook users are outside of college
• The fastest growing demographic is those 25 years old and older
• Average user has 100 friends on the site
• 2.6 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)
• More than 13 million users update their statuses at least once each day
• More than 2.5 million users become fans of Pages each day
  
• More than 700 million photos uploaded to the site each month
• More than 4 million videos uploaded each month
• More than 15 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each month
• More than 2 million events created each month
• More than 19 million active user groups exist on the site
• More than 35 translations available on the site, with more than 60 in development
• More than 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
• More than 660,000 developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries
  
• More than 52,000 applications currently available on Facebook Platform
• 140 new applications added per day
• More than 95% of Facebook members have used at least one application built on Facebook Platform

(Note: data from 12-18-08)

At current pace, Facebook is growing at around 600,000 users per day.