Trisha Prabhu, a 15-year-old teenager of Indian origin, wanted to change the traditional approach towards cyberbullying where the onus is on the victim to stop “engaging” the bully and ignore their hurtful comments.
So she created an app, which aims to rethink our approach towards cyberbullying by giving adolescent teenagers a chance to reconsider whether or not to post an offensive message online.
When an adolescent tries to post an offensive message on social media, ReThink uses its context sensitive filtering technology to determine whether a message is offensive or not, and sends a pop-up message asking the adolescent to reconsider their decision.
Cyberbullying is a growing menace in India and across the world. Everyone from Anant Ambani (Mukesh Ambani’s younger son who suffers from obesity) to the student studying in the neighbouring school has been a victim. According to Microsoft’s Global Youth Online Behavior Survey conducted across 25 countries on children aged between 8-17, India ranked third with over 53% respondents saying they have been bullied online, behind China (70%) and Singapore (58%).
ReThink is available on Android and has over 5,000 downloads already, and while it may not curb all possible cyberbullying, it may well be a step in the right direction.
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