Fitting that on Valentine's Day, an Idaho newspaper Post Register reporting on a Times-News story revealed a new app teens are downloading to their phones called 'After School.'

As we always say: same tactics: different technology. After School is an anonymous Rating Site, which allows users to make lewd sexual comparisons about their classmates with zero consequences. According to the story, the "...widespread use of the After School app has left a vicious mark of bullying in its wake — along with a lot of sex talk that includes the names of students and educators."

Posts on After School message boards tied to other south-central Idaho schools have included nude photos of students, derogatory comments about appearance, name calling and comments about students’ body parts."

If you are a parent, you should already be having a conversation about what apps are unacceptable to download with your teen, especially if you own their phone. Click here on expert advice on how to have The Conversation as well as smart tools to prevent cyberbullying on your teen's phone.

Schools and parents need to know if they try to download the app, they will find it requires student verification in the form of a student identification card or driver’s license. The app logs in the student through his or her Facebook account, which makes deleting it more difficult.

If you need to know how a Rating Site occurs (one of our six most common cyberbullying tactics, buy our Parent's Guide To A Rating Site on Kindle or purchase a softcover copy of Cyberslammed, our award-winning cyberbullying book.

You'd think after all this time, app and feature designers would consider how the latest tool they're promoting could be used to cyberbully, wouldn't you?
That's what Twitter is now realizing after rolling out a new feature that allows users to post poll questions.

Of course teenagers will use it to negatively rate each other. A Utah high school just figured that out when they discovered tweets with the poll feature asking people to rate the body parts of specific students, vote on an individual student's perceived level of sexual activity, or comment on the status of their relationships with other students. Read the whole story here.

For those who aren't familiar with this tactic, it's called a Rating Site, one of the six tactics listed in our cyberbullying prevention book, Cyberslammed. It's a common tactic to negatively rate, denounce or judge someone publicly. 

Said one of the teens in the story: "This isn't just kids being kids," Campbell said. "This is kids being mean. You can see kids getting revenge on other kids through the polls.
"It's definitely kids you go to school with," she added, "because it's rumors and it's everyone's deepest darkest secrets."


Know what to do when a group of people use Instagram, Facebook or  Internet polls to upload someone's photo and get bystanders to vote for their "ugliest," "fattest," "dumbest" peers? Our  Parent's Guide To A Rating Website is available on Kindle for $2.99. Buy here.

Or get up to speed on five other cyberbullying tactics along with this tactic in our award-winning book Cyberslammed.

The Allure and Danger of Posting Selfies Online is the second video in our webinar series to help give you a better understanding of Internet Safety and Cyberbullying.  Kay Stephens, co-author of Cyberslammed, tells us some things to consider before posting a selfie, ways that they are being used to cyberbully and how you can help protect your teen.

Click here to watch the 5 min webinar.  

Get all of the tactics in one book and prepare your child to recognize and defuse certain types of cyberbullying. Summer Sale: $12.50 Buy The Book


Over the last six months, experts have noticed a shift in the way teens are communicating. Tired of of the transparency and parental monitoring of Facebook, many are searching for more anonymous alternatives and are gravitating toward social networking sites like Whisper and Instagram.  New month, different app, that's the way it goes. Parents and teachers can't keep up. (Not surprisingly, by the time they do, that's the cue for the teens to move on.)  Instagram, a photo sharing app that can be registered under an anonymous screenname, is like an underground speakeasy. Adults aren't hip to all the hidden back rooms yet, making it a perfect app to be used as a cyberbullying tool.

Even though Instagram's Community Guidelines prohibit nudity and graphic sexual poses, within two minutes, I was able to find dozens and dozens of pages depicting drug use, slut-shaming women, and graphic, explicit nudity. (Some of these photos I don't doubt are underage, which would categorize it as child pornography).

Yes, this is where a lot of teens have found their new outlet. And to be fair, many teens simply use Instagram the way it was intended, to share photos with friends and be social. I'm not sure why Instagram allows the other photos to stay online given their Guidelines, but just earlier this month, a Napa California police department investigated an Instagram page after receiving multiple reports  that it contained “inappropriate” images of females.

The  images were posted on a page called “napahoezexxposed." Translation: Napa Hoez Exxposed-- an Instagram page dedicated to labeling certain girls and women as whores. This is a combined Sexting and Rating Site tactic where someone uploaded photos of females (allegedly without their consent) in various stages of undress (thus Sexting) with the motive to slut-shame these girls by allowing commenters to rate them (thus a Rating Site). I've seen multiple versions of the so-called "Exposing Hos" tactic on Facebook and Twitter, but, apparently Instagram is the new technological vehicle for the same type of behavior. 

Time Magazine's recent article "What Boys Want" by Rosalind  Wiseman recently featured a fascinating article on why today's teens engage in Sexting, even when they know of the steep risks. The takeway I got from this article is that with this digital generation so used to the casual release of Kim Kardashian-type of sex tapes, snapping a nude pic or photographing a sexually explicit pose isn't as a big deal to this generation as it should be.  Certain teens (particularly those with low-self esteem) tend to have a careless regard for their own image and reputation and just don't think about the consequences to such actions.  When sending a nude photo to a someone is the only way you'll get his/her attention or keep his/her attraction, there are bigger issues here than the actual photo. The same goes for teens who request the photos as status symbols and insurance (in case of being rejected.)

Regardless, you can now see how the stage has been set for using these photos as cyberbullying currency. With teenage girls, we must keep the conversation going about alternatives to Sexting, not from a prudish standpoint, but from a reputation-destroying-forever-online standpoint. No girl wants a private "for your eyes only" photo to go virally, embarrassingly public. But, as statistics show,  it inevitably will.  And today, when a lapse in judgment results in being branded a whore on the Internet for all to comment on and judge, this is the time to talk to that teen in your life about that secret photo on his/her phone they hope you'll never find out about.


Get all of the tactics in one book and prepare your child to recognize and defuse certain types of cyberbullying. Sale: $12.50 Buy The Book