Fitting in and standing out is an eternal rite of passage for teenagers. Increasingly, their struggles to establish hierarchies and regulate social norms fall under a single umbrella: bullying. The problem is considered so significant that all fifty states have passed anti-bullying legislation, and many schools now run prevention programs promoting tolerance, kindness, and bystander intervention. Yet bullying remains as widespread as ever. Why?

In The Tolerance Generation: Growing Up Online in the Anti-Bullying Era, sociologist Sarah Miller, Ph.D., finds the answer in a challenge unique to today’s teens: social media. Drawing on two school years alongside students at a Northeastern high school, Miller reveals how institutional efforts to curb bullying are no match for the online interactions where it now thrives. She follows teens as they navigate not only bullying but sexting exposures, school-shooting threats, and viral cancel culture, and shows how anti-bullying campaigns built to address isolated incidents fail to change the culture that produces harm, or to protect the marginalized students most often targeted.

Miller is an assistant professor of sociology, jointly appointed with the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, at Boston University. She will be in conversation with Matt Rafalow, Ph.D., a sociologist and senior staff researcher at Google (YouTube), as well as a research fellow at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where he co-directs the Annenberg Creator Research Network.