KDDI R&D Labs is developing a tool for preventing online bullying, which is a growing problem in our increasingly online society.
The aim is to investigate Social Networking Services and sites where school friends gather, as well as various kinds of personal Web sites, to find out the online relationships between individual students.
"Let me show you a specific example on this panel. Saki and Lisa belong to the same group of friends. One day, Saki comments on her own site: "Girls should keep their hands off other people's boyfriends!" Lisa thinks this comment is aimed at her. The problem here is that the girls are using a Web site. For example, if there are four friends, when the other two see this site, they understand that Saki and Lisa have fallen out. As a result, the next day, the group of four has split three to one, with only one person being the target of bullying."
Because online comments are anonymous, only the people in the group of friends know who is being attacked. So what KDDI has done is to identify hyperlinks from sites, in order to make the online communications between students visible.
"Suppose there's a pupil that a teacher is concerned about. The teacher can enter information about that pupil. Based on that information, the system can list Web sites that the pupil is likely to access and use regularly. From those results, human relations can be identified."
This chart doesn't just show hyperlinks, but if one individuals name is identified on several Web sites, it compares names and evaluates which school that person belongs to.
"This chart shows human relationships online. Red shows female students at junior high school. Blue shows male students. This symbol shows high school students, and this shows advertising sites. Even without expert knowledge, the chart suggests that communication is happening here. This is as far as we can get with technology. From here on, it's teachers that should make use of this information."
KDDI thinks this system could be a useful tool for preventing online bullying. It's assumed that the system will be used by teachers. However, due to the possibility of abuse, how to control access to the system must be considered carefully.
