Don’t Roast When You Post: Fighting Teen Cyberbullying with Empathy

In March 2024, our campaign for the Ministry of Digital Transformation came to life.

The worrying “normality” of peer violence.

Online hate speech is on the rise. More than half of primary and secondary school students have already experienced at least one form of online violence. After the covid-19 epidemic, the statistics worsened significantly.

64% of high school students believe that people are much more rude and mean online than in real life. Young people also normalize milder forms of online violence (eg insults) and don’t even fully define it as violence, even though they agree it affects them and makes them feel bad.

Enter: a campaign all about positivity.

To help turn the trend around for the better, we focused on the importance of positive communication, while the message was also supported by well-known young Slovenian athletes. Unfortunately, they too are very familiar with offensive, condescending and hateful online comments.

The »Don’t roast when you post« platform is designed with the goal of sharing comprehensible, encouraging and engaging messages with people both young and old.

Vibrant colors were chosen to correspond to the dominant colors of social networks (Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, etc.), while messages are presented in the form of a text bubble, commonly associated with “chat”, comment box, SMS, status box – in short: formats we see and use every day.

Every opportunity to send a hateful message is also an opportunity to keep it to ourselves. Thus, the slogan “Don’t roast when you post.«

The idea behind the slogan is continued in the visual language. Momentary “self-correction” options are represented by the autocorrect function.

With increased time spent behind screens, both interpersonal relationships and peer violence are moving online. A good quarter of teenagers (26.3%) is said to be almost constantly in online contact with their good friends, while every sixth teen (17%) is a victim of online bullying.

The challenge is extremely complex and needs consideration from all of us. Children, parents, grandparents, educators, authorities, and last but not least, us, communicaton experts.

Don’t roast when you post.