How Kids Use Google Docs to Bully Each Other
As a parent, you can walk past your child’s room and see him happily typing on the Google Docs page. “Beautiful!” you think. “She’s probably working on her research paper or finishing an essay on the rise of RBG.”
Or she could be on a secret chat.
In today’s issue of Trying to Be One Step Ahead of Our Kids on the Internet (Spoiler: We Can’t!) We offer the following warning: Some are using Google Docs, a seemingly useful web-based word processor. to bypass their parents’ technical rules. This is really impressive. All they have to do is open the document, invite their friends to be co-authors, and take off – they have private space to chat, draw, share links, upload photos, and post memes. Google Docs is hardly a program that parents are thinking of blocking (in fact, on tech message boards I saw several parents asking how to ban everything but software), and many kids already have school accounts. After a chat session, they can simply delete the document and empty their Trash folder without leaving any entries.
On Reddit, one user shared how their sister’s friend was jailed and her phone taken away, so her high school friends just moved their conversation to Google Docs. Author Ijeoma Oluo tweeted that her son used a workaround to get around his mother’s restrictions, which she felt was “adorably boring.”
In response to Oluo’s tweet, many parents shared that their kids did the same. One explained that the friends “marked colors to make it easier to understand who was speaking.” Another wrote that her daughter spends 90% of her time on Google Docs “sharing unicorn gifs.”
While this all sounds pretty innocuous (I’d love something like this in high school), the Bark parental control app team warns that kids also use word processor to bully – in fact, they say they’ve “seen over 60,000 cases of children joining with other children in Google Docs. ” (The service uses artificial intelligence technology to search for activities that could indicate cyberbullying, as well as online predators, drug use, and suicidal thoughts.)
“They work in tandem to write bad or hurtful things in a shared Google document,” the company said in a blog post. “In other cases, children create private digital notebooks and invite others to contribute, regardless of the teasing child.”
It’s difficult for parents. Children will always find a way to connect – perhaps you just see it as a modern version of passing a secret notebook in school halls, probably not the last example of teenage ingenuity. A few years ago , the story was told of how editor Mitch Wagner discovered that “several young girls were chatting gossip in the comment section of his old blog post” – since their school blocked social media, they picked random blog posts and used them as whiteboards discussions. You can try to follow your kids digitally, but that can make them hate you .
The best thing you can do is teach your kids how to stay safe: think twice before posting something they might later regret (just because a google doc is destroyed doesn’t mean someone doesn’t have screenshot). adults if they suspect cyberbullying or harassment, and not accept invitations from someone they don’t know. Alternatively, you can restrict the use of their technology to a common family area. You will have a better understanding of whether your kids are doing their homework, sharing unicorn gifs, or doing something worse.