Will the Bully Even Install It? / headspace "Reword"

The problem

In Australia, 463,000 young people experience cyberbullying every year, and victims face nine times the risk of self-harm or suicidal thoughts. Even so, the only response available was reporting it after the fact — there was no system built to stop the words from being written in the first place.

The insight

In headspace's internal testing, about 80% of young people who saw the red line changed their words. The key was interrupting people at the exact moment they were about to write something hurtful. And since young people hate being told what to do, the tool was designed so they could register and build up the list of insults themselves.

The idea

It's a simple tool built with JavaScript, using regular expressions to detect insults in real time. Built into social media and messaging apps, it was released for free as a Chrome extension that works on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. The key feature is that users can add their own words to flag.

What happened

After a pilot in two schools, it launched nationwide for schools to coincide with Australia's National Day of Action against Bullying and Violence. In the first six weeks, it was installed on 150,000 devices and spread to more than 260 schools. It won a D&AD 2017 Wood Pencil and the ADFEST 2017 Interactive Lotus Gold.

Afterthought

"Will the bully even install it?" — I had the same thought. It's not easy to get someone who writes cruel things to go out of their way and download something. So headspace brought in parents, schools, and the government, choosing instead to get adults to install it on computers first. But I wonder how that looked to the kids being watched. The tool itself is beautifully made. Still, it felt like a reminder of a hard truth about advertising: being right isn't enough to make people act.

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