Teenagers Tell Researchers It’s a Cruel, Cruel Online World

State legislatures across the country have passed or proposed laws against what they call cyberbullying. But how do young people parse bullying from being mean online? And when it happens, what do they do about it?

A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center and released Wednesday teases out these complex, often painful threads of teen life on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Two-thirds of the teenagers surveyed said people were “mostly kind” to each other on these networks, even as 88 percent said they had witnessed “people being mean or cruel.” One in five admitted to having joined in on the cruelty.   Full Read