Rethink before you type | Trisha Prabhu | TEDxTeen

Summary

In her impactful TEDxTeen talk, 14-year-old Trisha Prabhu addresses the heartbreaking issue of cyberbullying and introduces her innovative approach to prevent it: the "Rethink" program. Inspired by tragic stories of cyberbullying victims, she investigates why adolescents are particularly prone to such behavior. Drawing from her research on adolescent brain development, Trisha designs and tests an alert system that prompts users to reconsider posting offensive messages. Her trial shows remarkable success, with a significant reduction in offensive posts. Trisha's work not only highlights the significance of pausing before posting but also showcases the potential for simple yet profound solutions to make the digital world a safer place.

Highlights

• Trisha Prabhu was deeply moved by cyberbullying tragedies and decided to act. 💔
• Her research reveals that adolescents' impulsivity is linked to brain development stages. 🧠
• 'Rethink' is a software that triggers users to pause and reconsider posting harmful messages. 🚨
• Her amazing trial results showed a drop from 71.4% to 4.6% in willingness to post offensive content. 📉
• 'Rethink' now gaining traction, aiming to become a worldwide tool to fight cyberbullying. 🌐

Key Takeaways

• Young innovator Trisha Prabhu addresses cyberbullying head-on with her 'Rethink' project. 🚀
• Adolescents often post impulsively due to underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, but a simple prompt can change that. 🧠
• 'Rethink' proves to drastically reduce offensive posts, offering a fresh approach to combat cyberbullying. 🌟
• Cyberbullying affects millions; Trisha is determined to stop it globally with her product innovations. 🌎
• Small interventions like 'Rethink' provide crucial moments to prevent harm in our connected world. 🔍

Overview

In a heartfelt and powerful talk, Trisha Prabhu, a teenage advocate against cyberbullying, shares her motivation and innovative solution to combat this pervasive issue. Inspired by tragic stories of young victims, Trisha delves into the psychological reasons behind why adolescents are more likely to post hurtful messages online.

Her research unveiled the adolescent brain's tendencies toward impulsive actions due to its developmental stage. Armed with this insight, she created 'Rethink,' a system designed to alert and make users pause before posting potentially harmful messages. The result? A stunning drop in offensive postings during her trials, proving the effectiveness of her prompt intervention.

Trisha's journey from a shocked teenager to a tech innovator is truly inspiring. Her dedication to making 'Rethink' globally accessible underscores the importance of her mission. By emphasizing the power of stopping and thinking, she aims to reshape digital interactions worldwide, offering a simple yet profound tool to prevent cyberbullying.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction and story of Rebecca Sedwick The chapter titled 'Introduction and story of Rebecca Sedwick' recounts the tragic story of Rebecca Sedwick, an eleven-year-old girl from Florida. It begins with alarming phrases such as 'Girl, kill yourself,' and 'Why are you still alive?' which showcase the kind of bullying and cyberbullying that Rebecca was subjected to. These vicious comments highlight the ugly reality that some children face, even at such a young age. The chapter aims to provide an insightful narrative into Rebecca's story, shedding light on the devastating impact of bullying on young individuals.
• 01:00 - 03:00: Story of Megan Meier and Tyler Clementi The chapter discusses the tragic stories of Megan Meier and Tyler Clementi. Megan received cruel messages on social media that drove her to take her life by jumping off a water tower. The narrator recalls coming home in 2013 to read about such heartbreaking events, reflecting the deep impact of cyberbullying.
• 03:00 - 06:00: Understanding the adolescent brain and cyberbullying This chapter begins with a poignant anecdote about a young girl, Rebecca, who tragically took her own life due to cyberbullying. It introduces the narrator, Trisha Prabhu, a 14-year-old from Naperville, Illinois. Motivated by the heartbreak of Rebecca's story, Trisha is driven to take action to prevent such tragedies in the future. The narrative sets the stage for exploring the impacts of cyberbullying on adolescents and the crucial understanding of the adolescent brain in addressing these issues.
• 06:00 - 10:00: Trisha's research and the "Rethink" solution The chapter "Trisha's research and the 'Rethink' solution" introduces Trisha's passion for halting cyberbullying at its source. It conveys her desire to enable everyone to dream and pursue their dreams unhampered. The pivotal moment comes when she reads Rebecca's story, which ignites her curiosity about the prevalence of similar sufferings and reveals that Rebecca's experience is unfortunately far from an isolated incident.
• 10:00 - 12:30: Impact and future of Rethink The chapter detailed the tragic story of Megan Meier, who died by suicide at thirteen, just weeks before her fourteenth birthday. This tragedy was precipitated by cyberbullying on her Myspace account, where she received harmful messages such as 'The world would be a better place without you.' The chapter emphasizes the severe impact of cyberbullying and hints at the need for initiatives like Rethink to prevent such occurrences in the future.
• 12:30 - 14:30: Conclusion and message to rethink before posting This chapter focuses on an incident involving Tyler Clementi, an eighteen-year-old student at Rutgers University. As he was acclimating to college life and embracing his gay identity, his roommate and a friend maliciously invaded his privacy. They used a webcam and a laptop to broadcast Tyler's intimate moments with his boyfriend on social media, causing irreversible damage. The concluding message urges readers to reconsider their actions before posting online, highlighting the severe impact such invasions of privacy can have on individuals.

Rethink before you type | Trisha Prabhu | TEDxTeen Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 Transcriber: Leonardo Silva Reviewer: Mile Živković "Girl, kill yourself." "Why are you still alive?" "You are so ugly." Rebecca Sedwick, an eleven-year-old girl from Florida,
• 00:30 - 01:00 received those mean, hurtful, tormenting and embarrassing messages on her social media. They would ultimately lead her to jump off of her town's water tower to her death. In the fall of 2013, I would come home from school to read that story. I was stunned, shocked,
• 01:00 - 01:30 and I was heart-broken. How could a girl younger than myself be pushed to take her own life? That's when I knew I had to do something to stop this from ever happening again. But the pain and the misery that Rebecca endured had already happened. The damage was done. My name is Trisha Prabhu, I'm fourteen years old, and I'm from the great city of Naperville, in Illionois, in the United States.
• 01:30 - 02:00 I'm passionate to stop cyberbullying at the source, before the damage is done. I'm a big dreamer, and I believe that everyone should have the right to dream, persist in their dream, and see that become a reality. So, when I read Rebecca's story, I immediately wondered, "Were there any others like her out there, that were suffering as well?" I'd soon learn that she was one of a countless many.
• 02:00 - 02:30 Megan Meier died three weeks before her fourteenth birthday. She hung herself in her bedroom closet where her mother would find her when coming up to get her for dinner. She'd received messages like, "The world would be a better place without you", on her Myspace account. The damage was done, and Megan suffered the consequences.
• 02:30 - 03:00 Tyler Clementi was an eighteen-year-old student at Rutgers University. He was just getting used to college life and his new gay identity. One day, his roommate and a friend decided to use a webcam and a laptop to stream some of Tyler's most intimate moments with his boyfriend all over social media. The damage was done.
• 03:00 - 03:30 Humiliated, Tyler took his life, jumping off of the George Washington bridge. I wish more than anything that I could rewrite those stories. I wish I could make every perpetrator rethink what they did. But what if I could do that? What if I could stop the damage before it was done? Would Megan, Tyler and Rebecca still be alive today?
• 03:30 - 04:00 Cyberbullying is a huge problem. 52% of adolescents in the United States alone have been cyberbullied. And 38% of them suffered suicidal tendencies. Let's look at it from a global perspective. A quarter of the world's population are adolescents. We're talking 1.8 billion teens. Imagine that in the social media revolution; how more and more of them are getting on social media,
• 04:00 - 04:30 and more and more of them are being cyberbullied. So, why do you get cyberbullied? Look, I might be biased, but I'm pretty sure that kids are not mean devils that run around with cruel intentions. I don't know about you, but that's what I think. And what about adults? Are they nice or mean on social media? Now, when it comes to adults, I wasn't really sure. So, I had to do some research to figure that out. So, that year, for my science experiment at school,
• 04:30 - 05:00 I decided to look at how age affected the willingness to post offensive messages on social media sites. What did I find? This younger age group, ages twelve to eighteen, was 40% more willing to post an offensive message than an older age group. OK. The number didn't surprise me. But why? Why was that younger age group so much more willing to post an offensive message? I started to do a lot of research,
• 05:00 - 05:30 and, one day, I came across an article, and it had one sentence that would forever change my view on this problem. They said, "The adolescent brain is likened to a car with no breaks." High speed. No pausing. No thinking. No considering. We just act. So why is it like that? Our brains are kind of weird. They develop from the back to the front, which means that our front part of the brain
• 05:30 - 06:00 is not fully developed until age 25. Why is that a problem? Well, prefrontal cortex controls decision-making skills, rash, impulsive decisions, spur-of-the-moment feelings. So, that's why adolescents don't think before they act. They just go ahead and do something, whether it's downing fifteen Red Bulls on a dare, skipping an English final,
• 06:00 - 06:30 doing something crazy. We don't really think before we do it. Well, then I was venting about this to a friend. I was like, "Gosh, you know, this is horrible." And she said, "You know, Trisha, I really admire your passion, but you've been talking about this for the last 15 minutes, as if you had just discovered it. It's a huge problem, but social media sites are already doing stuff to stop this." And I went, "Oh, yeah. You're right." But I'd soon find that what social media sites are doing
• 06:30 - 07:00 is really nothing. Their mechanism is a "stop, block, tell" method. You stop what you're doing, through the victim, you block the cyberbully and you immediately go tell a parent or guardian. It sounds pretty reasonable. But here's what actually happens: adolescents, we're kind of afraid to tell people that we're being cyberbullied. Research shows that nine out of ten times victims don't tell anyone that they're being cyberbullied.
• 07:00 - 07:30 What's more, why are we putting the burden on the victim to block the cyberbully? Why aren't we changing the behavior in the actual cyberbully? And it angered me. There wasn't a single effective way to stop cyberbullying, and it was a silent pandemic that was affecting so many people around the world. That's when I had an idea. I know from my research that adolescents don't think before they do things, right? So, what if they didn't think before they type?
• 07:30 - 08:00 What if I gave them a chance to think about what they were doing? If an adolescent tried to post an offensive message on social media, if I went, "Whoa! Hold on. You're about to post an offensive message to someone. That can really hurt them. Are you sure you want to post this message?", would they still be as willing to do it? I had no idea, but I was ready to find out.
• 08:00 - 08:30 So that year, using my science and technology skills, I created two software systems. And basically, they were able to compare whether an alert that prompted adolescents to think about what they were doing actually decreased their willingness to post offensive messages. So, for four to six weeks, I basically lived at my local library. All the kids were always giving me weird looks, but, you know, in the end, it was totally worth it. I was able to get 1,500 valid trials of data.
• 08:30 - 09:00 And what did I find? 93% of the time when adolescents receive an alert that says, "Whoa! You're about to post an offensive message", they changed their mind. I was able to decrease the willingness to post offensive messages from 71.4% to 4.6%. (Cheers) (Applause)
• 09:00 - 09:30 Think about that. My research proved that rethink before you type, rethink before you post, rethink before the damage is done is an effective long-term method to stop cyberbullying, at the source, before the damage is done. So Rethink has become insanely popular -- I'm glad to say. Just a few weeks ago, I was at the Google Science Fair for my research. I'm a global finalist.
• 09:30 - 10:00 And I also currently -- (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) And I also currently hold a United States provisional patent for this idea. So now, my main goal is getting this out there as a product, and stopping cyberbullying. I'm currently working tirelessly to create a Chrome extension browser and a mobile add-on for mobile platforms. That way, Rethink can go global and stop cyberbullying before the damage is done.
• 10:00 - 10:30 Steve Jobs once said, "Simple can be harder than complex. Original, much harder than derived. But when you get there, it's worth it, because you can move mountains." He is so right. Rethink has proven that, in those few seconds, when you decide whether or not you're going to hit "post", those few seconds mean so much in the future.
• 10:30 - 11:00 So, whether you're about to post an offensive message about the fat girl that sits ahead of you in your class, or your annoying boss, that can mean the fat girl's life, or your job. So, I encourage all of you: rethink before the damage is done. Very rarely in this connected world do we remember, we need to slow down,
• 11:00 - 11:30 pause, think about what we're doing. We're posting a message and that has significance. So, choose to rethink. Rethink before you type, before the damage is done. Thank you. (Cheers) (Applause)