Trisha Pranhu is an incredible young woman.
At age 23, the Harvard Graduate and Rhodes Scholar is currently researching Social Sciences of the Internet at Oxford University – and she just happens to have invented a piece of life-changing technology making waves in the world of online safety.
Innovator, social entrepreneur and global advocate Trisha is the creator of the award-winning Rethink technology, an app which detects and stops cyberbullying at its source, by suggesting a user pauses and rethinks their online language and behaviour. It’s now in use in 136 nations.
Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle were so impressed by Trisha's work that their Archewell Foundation chose Rethink as one of the online safety projects to help fund and personally phoned Trisha to talk about her ground-breaking projects.
Trisha told HELLO! about the exciting call: "It was a surreal moment," she reveals. "It was a surprise when I picked up the phone and they said, 'Hi, it's Harry and Meghan'. They were so kind and so supportive."
Trisha's Rethink initiative, which has a non-profit arm called Rethink Citizens, was selected to be part of the Responsible Technology Youth Power Fund – consisting of 14 groups and charities providing funding to 26 projects. One of the aims of the RTYPF is to find ways to make online life less toxic for young people.
A look at Rethink's website makes for impressive reading.
It says that when adolescents are asked to reconsider using harmful language by the Rethink technology, they change their minds 93% of the time, and astonishingly, their willingness to post an offensive message reduces from 71% to 4%.
HELLO! spoke to Trisha about the work she is doing to help stop cyberbullying amongst young people online…
Trisha, tell us how you first came up with the idea for Rethink…
The journey really started for me when I was 13 years old growing up in the suburbs of Chicago. I came home from school one day and I happened to read a news story of a young girl aged 12 who had been cyberbullied for a year and a half, and who unfortunately died by suicide because of the cyberbullying harassment that she experienced.
I remember being so shocked and heartbroken and wondering how it was acceptable that that was the status quo.
I felt frustrated that at the time the predominant solution to tackle bullying, and especially cyberbullying, was to encourage victims to block the cyberbully and tell a parent. But in fact, research finds that 90% of cyberbullying victims choose not to tell anyone. They choose to suffer in silence.
As a kid, I experienced harassment of my own, both in person and online, and for a very long time, my intention was to forget about it, like so many victims. I wanted to move on from that chapter.
But then reading that article at age 13, I realised that it wasn't just me. I had thought for the longest time, 'There's something wrong with me and that's why I'm being bullied and cyber-harassed.'
I realised it was a silent pandemic affecting millions of youths. Young people suffered in silence, without support, through a lot of mental health challenges, and in extreme cases, the cyberbullying was literally deadly. I was deeply frustrated by that picture.
My thought was, 'How can I solve this problem?' More specifically, given the gap that I'd identified, how can we take on this problem proactively rather than putting the burden on the victim to do something after it happens, by asking them to speak up?
Could we instead turn it around and actually change behaviour at the source with every digital citizen, so that everyone's thinking really critically and intentionally when they're communicating online? That was my vision and the idea that resulted was Rethink.
It was a very simple idea of, 'What if I can detect offensive content before it's sent and then give a young person a break, a chance to pause and think about it and really encourage them to consider the consequences of their words in a way that a lot of people don't in a digital context. Would that change their behaviour?'
I found it was an extremely practical way to stop cyberbullying and I ultimately launched a product, and eventually a social enterprise around the product called Rethink.
How does the technology work?
You download it as a keyboard on your device that replaces your device's default keyboard, and then it works across all the apps on your device - from email to social media - to detect offensive content and then give you a chance to pause, review and rethink.
As you're typing an alert will pop up and say, 'Hold on, are you sure you want to post this, it could be offensive'. The actual message varies to keep the efficacy rate high. We find it's extremely effective.
It makes sense because brain science tells us young people's decision-making centre, their prefrontal cortex, is not fully developed until their mid-twenties.
So in that period of adolescence, young people are predisposed in the heat of the moment to make decisions that they may regret, and in the digital environment, it's extremely easy to do that. In a world that's all about instant decisions and instant communication, it's easy to do things that we'd never do in person.
We try to get in the middle of that, to get young people to pause and rethink. We find that young people respond to that and ultimately make better decisions for themselves and for the people that they are interacting with.
A lot of the work we do is primarily with educational institutions to put the Rethink technology on their school devices, so they are on there by default.
Long term, I think it would be really fantastic to collaborate with phone carriers, with platforms, to make this the default on every device. That's something that we're working towards right now.
How have young people responded to Rethink?
We do a lot of work with educational communities and sometimes I'll go and speak with students who are using the technology. A lot of them empathise with the notion of saying or doing something that you might regret later.
The other thing they like is that Rethink takes a very restorative approach to tackling cyberbullying – it assumes that the person saying something mean is not a bad person or beyond repair, they are someone who's making a mistake.
We know that cyberbullies are also former victims of bullying; they are folks who have experienced harm and trauma themselves. They're taking their frustrations and difficulties out on other people.
It's not acceptable of course, but we can understand that we're dealing with people who are facing challenges themselves and maybe looking for somebody to believe in them and to give them a reason to aspire to be better, to tap into their conscience in a world that might normally be looking for them to make bad decisions.
They have the potential to make better decisions and I think that's something that inspires a lot of young people.
What was it like speaking to Prince Harry and Meghan?
Prince Harry and Meghan called and spoke with us and learned a little bit about our work. It was an incredible moment. It was a surreal moment. I didn't know that they were going to be on the other end of the line!
They are so passionate and have done so much work around trying to make the internet a kinder inclusive place, so to have them back me and back my ideas, and to have them say it's really important that we have young people's voices enfold as we envision a better digital world, that was really powerful and really encouraging.
It was very validating and a very special moment.