These teens are using tech to put an end to cyberbullying

Sometimes, you’ve gotta fight fire with fire. When it comes to these amazing teens, that doesn’t mean fighting cyberbullying with more cyberbullying, it means using their tech skills to put and end to it once and for all. DoSomething.org and Coca-Cola are coming together for a Happiness Hackathon, a three-day event dedicated to addressing cyberbulling from a tech perspective just for teens.

We all know this is a big problem. DoSomething.org reports that 50% of young people have been bullied online and, even worse, 90% of the teens who witness the problem don’t do anything to stop it. I don’t think that’s their fault. I just think we aren’t aware of all the possible courses of action, which it why the Happiness Hackathon is so integral to stopping this unfortunate phenomena.

For National Bullying Prevention Month, teens submitted possible proposals to the project for finding solutions to this issue. From that pool, the organization picked out 15 teens with diverse backgrounds and experiences to attend the event in New York City.

This group was then split into three, and each were given mentors to work through the issues, some of which related to the teens’ personal experiences with bullying. Like any good teens, the ideas they came up with were tech-related. For instance, one idea was to create an app that would require any social media users who get their accounts suspended to take an online anti-bullying seminar in order to get their profiles back. Pretty nifty, right?

While the concepts created aren’t currently being developed, the project is committed to making them a reality. With our support behind them, we can get the app to our phones even faster.

Watch a video about the experience below!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I0E6DCcMc0

(Image via YouTube.)

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