Cyberbullying is a critical issue to the health and mental health of our children and teens. Eighty-seven percent of youth have witnessed cyberbullying. Nearly two-thirds of students who have experienced cyberbullying stated that it affected their ability to learn and feel safe at school. At Identity Guard, we began looking into how our monitoring services, empowered by IBM Watson technologies, could be applied to this issue in 2016. We reached out to academics and experts to learn more about cyberbullying and its consequences, and to ascertain how we might design an effective solution to combat it.

An astonishing 87% of youth have witnessed cyberbullying. In 2017 alone, over 13 million American children were bullied or cyberbullied. For me, the struggle against bullying and cyberbullying is a personal one. In October of 2006, my 13-year-old daughter Megan took her own life as a result of cyberbullying. Committed to helping prevent similar tragedies, I founded the Megan Meier Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to supporting and inspiring actions to end bullying and cyberbullying.