First things first: happy birthday, Canada.

Now, it seems we can’t ever escape this topic, but a gaggle of recent discussions involving cyberbullying have been begging for our attention.

I’ll begin with a study by McAfee/Harris [pdf], which appears to show a decline in online bullying in spite of a sensationalist press release that encouraged negative reports media-wide. While there are a number of areas of potential concern (e.g. 37 percent of 10- to 12-year-olds are on Facebook), a closer reading of the study indicates that the press release claim (“cyberbullying on the rise”!) is well off the mark, with the percentage of teens reporting that they have “ever been bullied or harassed online ” down from 15% in 2008 to 8% in 2010. Again, where the press release brays: ”Nearly 50 Percent of Teens Don’t Know What to Do if Cyberbullied,” back in the real world of the report, we learn that ”1 in 4 teens say they wouldn’t know what to do if they were bullied or harassed online” and that a ” significantly higher proportion disagree with this statement in 2010 than in 2008, suggesting that teens may now be better equipped to handle cyberbullying.” The report also adds: ”many youth who have been bullied or harassed online say they have made some adjustments to their online behavior as a result (72 percent).”

I’d be really curious to know how the author(s) of the press release reconcile all that with the aforementioned “cyberbullying on the rise.” Beware the distorted filters of the information-glut which is the Web, I guess.

Anyway, if you want to read a sane breakdown of the report, Larry Magid’s your man.