Technology has made online bullying impossible to escape. Bullying has moved from schoolyards to social media, but kids don’t think about the effect their words can really have. To try to stop bullying, the focus has always been on reporting it after it’s happened. But, there’s been nothing to protect children from it happening in the first place, as leading social media platforms have failed to create effective measures to combat online bullying behaviour.
So we created Reword. A real time alert for online bullying, acting as an educational tool to develop a child’s moral compass when they become active on social media.
Reword is built with a custom lexicon database that uses multiple strings to create millions of potential insult combinations. As a child types regex matching cross references the database to identify abusive patterns.
Working with schools our potential bullies and victims took ownership of the problem and actively promoted Reword. They submitted over 20,000 insults, creating millions of new combinations for the database.
A passion project that was backed by agency and outside investors allowed us to develop reword into a full scale brand. The initial concept, the development and design of the tool were all created from scratch utilising a range of self taught skills. The visual identity took inspiration from spell and grammar checkers. The non-invasive red-line influenced the brand’s visual language.
Reword had garnered huge support nationwide, as educators and parents had eagerly promoted its implementation in their schools and homes. Reword now had the potential to be used to educate every child in Australia – not just on computers, but on personal tablets and mobile devices.
Outside of Australia, Reword had struck a chord, attracting international coverage from the likes of CNN, Good Morning America, Wired and Mashable, as well as personal messages from online abuse victims globally. As Reword continues to grow, so will its impact, creating a new generation that respects each other – online and in real life.