Read an Excerpt from “The Tolerance Generation: Growing Up Online in the Anti-Bullying Era” by Sarah Miller
Fitting in and standing out in high school is an eternal rite of passage for youth. Increasingly, these struggles to establish and maintain hierarchies are labeled under the umbrella of “bullying.”
In The Tolerance Generation, sociologist Sarah Miller explores how youth grapple with bullying in the digital age and the industry designed to prevent it. Based on two school years with students at a Northeastern high school, Miller calls “Township,” the book chronicles how adolescents navigate conflict in an increasingly digital society, all while their educators promote tolerance. Charting teens’ lives as they are affected not only by bullying, but also by sexting exposures, school shooting threats, and viral cancel culture, their stories illustrate the amplifying pressures social media places on youth and why bullying prevention efforts fail to help them.
In the following excerpt from the introduction, Miller shares how anti-bullying initiatives can be just as easily used to justify the tolerance of intolerance and why youth are held responsible for preventing bullying in the digital age.
Growing Up Online in the Anti- Bullying Era
I arrived at Township High School thinking that I was studying a clearly defined phenomenon between “bullies” and the “bullied.” I quickly realized that I, like many adults, was looking for the wrong things. For Township educators and administrators, bullying signaled the repetitive, targeted, visible conflicts that they were now responsible for preventing among their students. Their approach, built on the guidance of the US Department of Education and widely acclaimed bullying prevention programs, at times mapped onto the experiences of structurally privileged, popular teens. These students were more likely to engage in targeted conflicts over social status, to file bullying reports, and to benefit from their protection. Yet, for most teens, especially those with nondominant identities, bullying was both understood and experienced as an atmosphere of marginalization rather than a targeted attack; its diffuse nature made it less reportable and made it more virulent due to social media.
Among Township adults, dealing with bullying involved policing conflicts that met the criteria of their anti-bullying policies. For their students, it meant navigating their inequitable, digitally mediated lives. Social media platforms are a pressure cooker for bullying. They do not change the ingredients of teens’ conflicts, but they do affect the speed at which those ingredients cook. They are also an aspect of adolescence that teens largely can’t opt out of. For the vast majority of Township youth, participating in the social world of high school meant being online. Offering teens the ability to, as sociologists Hana Shepherd and Jeffrey Lane describe, “be in the know” and “to become or be known,” digital platforms create new dimensions for social integration in their school communities, shaping whom students know and what students know about each other, their integral public nature providing a steady stream of material that could be used for various ends. In addition to the often-stark visual representation of their daily lives during and after school hours, teens’ political affiliations, religions, attitudes toward current events, personality quirks, relationship issues, intimate explorations, and random thoughts were all openly on display, with the capacity to be spread to the entire school community in seconds.
The digital world is an engine for teen social life, one that no longer operates independently outside school walls. Instead, it serves as an extension of school. In a feedback loop, the messages embedded in built educational environments travel into teens’ digital engagements and blend with the ideologies circulating online, which are then carried back into classrooms.9 This dynamic has produced new responsibilities and challenges for young people, including in their experiences of conflict. Just as they bring them to class, teens carry their values and prejudices with them into digital spaces, using “networked publics” to negotiate and make sense of their identities and beliefs. As communications scholar danah boyd shows us, social media offers conflicts related to this sense-making: replicability, searchability, and invisible audiences,11 within a largely unregulated, virtual playground often closed to adults. This means that teens no longer need to directly target each other to express hostility. The structure and flow of the network does it for them. They also do not need to change their underlying attitudes or biases that bolster most bullying behaviors. They simply need to learn not to share them in person at school. The affordances of social media make the conflicts most concerning to teens the most difficult to address due to their invisibility to adults. Surrounded by anti-bullying efforts that misinterpret how youth experience conflict in the digital age, Township students were held responsible for preventing bullying and left to handle things on their own.
On the surface, their efforts appeared to be effective. Early in my fieldwork, I realized that if I really wanted to understand bullying as a phenomenon, I needed to stop asking teens about their conflicts and start asking why they were acting so “nice.” This was because they were very good at seeming to get along. For some students, this effect was genuine. For others, it obscured underlying dislike or disgust. This latter group of teens engaged in what I came to understand as the performance of tolerance. This performance was characterized by surface-level gestures toward civility, while avoiding direct contact with peers whose identities or actions made others uncomfortable— what Josiah signals above as accepting a nondominant peer “but not really.” Social media expands this performance’s capacities, allowing students to display cordiality in person while sharing their judgments online, hidden from adults’ punitive gaze.
These teens’ investment in tolerance, either as a performance or a shared value, is understandable. North Americans— especially those who benefit from having white, heterosexual, and class privilege— often deal with difference by stressing tolerance, a by- product of multicultural approaches to education as well as the diversity and inclusion efforts present in universities and workplaces for decades. Though these efforts are now embattled in US politics, tolerance remains a widely endorsed guiding principle within many institutions. This is especially so in schools. The promotion of tolerance has long been a core tenet of the Department of Education’s guidance for bullying prevention and a central approach to fostering positive school climates nationwide.
Hand in hand with tolerance, the educational landscape is further saturated with a discourse organized around the virtues of kindness and niceness, which education scholars and sociologists show often prioritize white, middle-class, good intentions while avoiding addressing structural and social injustice in schools. Prevention initiatives that prioritize tolerance, niceness, and kindness are all widely employed by the anti- bullying industry. Collectively, they are an important antidote to the teenage threats of “mean girls” and “cyberbullies” that circulate in the media, not to mention coverage of the dire cases of young people who have lost their lives due, in part, to bullying’s effects. But these “feel-good” approaches to handling both diversity and conflict are never extended in equal measure to all students, nor were they intended to create equity or foster justice. Instead, in their incapacity to address power, as you’ll see, anti- bullying initiatives can be just as easily used to justify the tolerance of intolerance.
Tolerance flavored the scenery of Township teens’ Generation Z adolescence, shaped by a series of significant cultural transformations, including childhoods defined by the election of the United States’ first biracial president and the rapid evolution of LGBTQ visibility and rights. I began observing them just a few months after Time Magazine declared that the country had reached a “Transgender Tipping Point,” marked by a sharp increase in gender diversity rights activism and transgender visibility, and a few weeks after Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager, was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, accelerating the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. The start of their summer vacation was marked by the landmark Obergefell v. Hodges ruling, legalizing marriage for same- gender couples, twenty days prior to Donald Trump’s announcement of his first presidential candidacy. Meanwhile, the popular culture many were consuming was characterized by an ever- increasing number of advertising campaigns and celebrities touting the virtues of kindness, alongside a plethora of media coverage about bullying- related suicides and school shootings. These students were exposed to a whiplash of civil rights discourse and backlash in the time I spent with them. While they were actively responding to these shifts with their peers online, they were largely not being taught about the impacts of racial, gender, and sexual inequalities and their outcomes at school. Instead, these teens were learning not to be bullies.
The anti-bullying era subjected youth to new forms of surveillance over how they collectively made sense of these broader cultural changes. Teens now knew that adults expected them to perform tolerance and to police bullying within their peer groups both offline and online. These well- meaning efforts had good intentions to protect all students, and in particular those with nondominant identities, from victimization. They were not, however, accompanied by inclusive curricular shifts, policies, or initiatives to mitigate the more subtle, yet pervasive impacts of social inequality that were shaping their social lives and relationships. In place of these efforts, “bullying” became the primary discourse for harm to be legible at school, eclipsing educators’ and teenagers’ capacities to address more consequential, yet often less obvious, forms of structural and social violence.
Today the landscape shaping teenagers’ social lives has changed dramatically. The first and second Trump administrations generated significant resistance to the tolerance promoted in US politics while I was in the field, spanning an increasing number of bias- related hate crimes, elevated bullying rates in Republican districts, and a variety of laws and policies that restrict immigration, voting, LGBTQ and reproductive rights, and the promotion of racial justice. Our current cultural turn toward intolerance is reconfiguring education, shaping what teachers can teach, what young people can learn, and increasing the hostile contours of school climates for nondominant youth nationwide. This backlash has crystallized in a series of recent federal initiatives aimed at dismantling racial, sexual, and gender diversity recognition, rights, and research— amid the rapid expansion of immigration enforcement, anti– critical race theory, “Don’t Say Gay,” and anti-trans bills at the state level— all of which make dealing with inequality at school a minefield.
Meanwhile, in the absence of educational interventions that address the unequal society where US youth come of age, and in the presence of proliferating legislative efforts to further curtail them, anti-bullying efforts are fast becoming a dominant and inadequate substitute for more meaningful social justice–informed initiatives within schooling.
Sarah Miller is assistant professor of sociology at Boston University.
The Tolerance Generation is available now from our website or your favorite bookseller.
Excerpted from The Tolerance Generation by Sarah Miller, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2026 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.