“Cyber bullying is harassing someone using the Internet, cell phones and any sort of digital technology. A common scenario is they will find somebody’s picture on the Internet that they know from school. Let’s say it’s ‘Amy.’ I download the picture, Photoshop it, go to MySpace, create a new account, create a new e-mail address and display this whole ‘I Hate Amy’ MySpace page. Then I have everybody at school write mean things about Amy in the comments section. Amy finds out that now everybody at the school hates her and has no clue who started this page.

I had to do a master’s thesis, so I went to Kennedy Middle School in Redwood City and volunteered for 10 weeks at their after-school program with a group of sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade girls. I needed to find out if this is really a problem. We did this MySpace activity where we made fake pages. I brought in pictures of kids I found on the Internet and said, ‘Write whatever you want.’ They all wrote really mean things. I said, ‘Is this something that would happen on the Internet?’ They said, ‘Yes, because I don’t know them’ or ‘because it’s funny.’