On Thursday October 1, 2015, Karen Haase came to give the students of Alliance Middle School and High School in Alliance,Nebraska their annual presentation on internet safety. Karen Haase is a lawyer from Lincoln, Nebraska  who often deals with cases concerning internet safety among teens. The three topics of interest that she spoke about were cyberbullying, sexting, and basic internet safety.

What we post online does not just affect us in our personal lives, but it can affect us in our school lives, work lives, and relationships with others. Cyberbullying and/ or sexting can be punishable in school through detention, suspension, loss of extracurriculars, and expulsion. These acts are also punishable by law.

When Haase asked the Alliance High School student body who all had at least heard of cyberbullying, the majority of students raised their hands, this proves that cyberbullying is a well known problem among high-schoolers today. With social media being so wide spread and dominant in our lives today, some people post things online that they would never have the guts to say or do in person. This makes the bully’s confidence level higher, because they do not have to deal with face-to-face interaction, making them much more savage online than they would be otherwise.

Sexting refers to an act of sending sexually explicit materials primarily through mobile phones, this includes texts and pictures. Children as young as the age of 12 have sent an explicit text or picture. Forty percent of the children that send such texts say that they were pressured into doing so, even if the child only knew the person asking them, through social media.

The basics of internet safety are pretty simple and most people know them. Some of these include not giving out personal information, such as a phone number or address, being careful about who you befriend on the internet, and not posting anything bad about yourself or others. A lot of the time we forget that the internet is never truly anonymous and nothing is ever private or entirely deleted, which is why it is important to think before you post.