Melania Trump vows to combat bullying despite skepticism
United States First Lady Melania Trump said Tuesday that she is committed to fighting cyberbullying despite criticism she receives for the way her husband routinely attacks her enemies and names them.
"I am aware that people do not think I should discuss this issue," she said. "I have been criticized for my commitment to this issue, and I know I will continue. But (that) will not stop me from doing the right thing. I am here with one goal: to help children and our next generation," she noted.
Trump made the statement during a panel discussion with executives from top online and social media companies at the White House, called to discuss cyberbullying and internet safety.
The meeting takes place more than a year after Mrs. Trump announced that combating bullying on the networks would be her cause if her husband were elected president.
Her decision was immediately criticized, but Melania Trump said she would not abandon her.
On Tuesday, she said that she receives many letters from children who have been bullied or feel threatened on social media, and acknowledged that the subject has been studied for years. To the executives, she told them that she wants to hear "what they have learned, what has been achieved and the progress they need to make."
"I believe that together we can make a real difference to encourage positive behaviors on social media," added the American First Lady.
Representatives from Amazon, Snap, Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft were in attendance, as well as the Internet Association and the Institute for Family Online Safety.
The major tech companies have strict policies that prohibit harassment and intimidation on their services, but they mostly rely on users to report abuse and take action to combat it.
The policies against cyberbullying are clearly explained in special sections and messages, as does Facebook, the largest social network on the internet. Instagram, a popular photo and video sharing service for children and young adults, includes links to the US government's anti-bullying page and advice from an anti-bullying research center.
But the efforts have been unsuccessful, so the abuses are rampant and some companies acknowledge that they have led users to leave the networks or have tormented them.
Twitter, which has 68 million users in the United States, vowed last year to go after those who write hate messages. The San Francisco-based company adopted policies to protect women whose nude photos had been distributed online with or without their consent, a common intimidation practice.
Yik Yak, a messaging app that was popular for a time with high school and college students, closed last year in part because schools banned it after complaints about bullying and harassment.
Cyberbullying occurs in many ways, one of the most common tactics is to upload scandalous or embarrassing photos accompanied by cruel messages, or to write a message about someone and share screen images of something that at least one person thought was a private text .
Bullying is widespread among teens and even adults. A Pew Research Center study last year found that 41 percent of American adults believe they have been bullied online.
The popularity and volume of content on the major social networks represents a great challenge to monitor what is shared. Facebook, for example, has 2.1 million users who together share billions of messages daily. More than 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube on Google every minute.
Companies are also constantly trying to balance a desire to prevent cyberbullying and other abuses with a commitment to freedom of expression.
In some cases, they consider bullying and keep looking the other way. For example, some of President Trump's cruelest tweets have been openly ridiculed and denigrated by people, leading users to ask Twitter to close his account and remove him from the service. But Twitter has rejected the calls, claiming that the president's tweets have news value, overshadowing complaints that he is a stalker.
There is no federal law that applies to online harassment. State laws range from requiring public schools to have anti-bullying policies to requiring anonymous systems to report bullying, says Sameer Hinduja, co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Center and professor of Criminology at Florida Atlantic University.
The federal government can help schools by giving them more tools and money for anti-bullying programs, Hinduja said.
At the end of the 2016 presidential campaign, Mrs. Trump announced in a speech that her priority as her First Lady would be to fight cyberbullying.
