In 2007, one year after Twitter was created, 3.7 percent of students in sixth through 12th grade said they had been cyberbullied, according to data compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau. In May of this year, the website Statistics Brain reported that 52 percent of students say they have been affected by cyberbullying in some form, and the most common targets are girls, based on statistics from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Bureau of Justice Statistics, and Cyberbullying Research Center. Pierce said she believes social media has made it easier to be bullied. "It doesn't necessarily have to be a stranger on the Internet. The majority of the time, it's people that you know. You post something on Facebook or Twitter, and they think it's easier to be rude on the Internet because they aren't having to say those things to your face." But as harmful as the effects of cyberbullying can be, there isn't an easy way to put a stop to it, said Carlsbad Municipal Schools Superintendent Gary Perkowski. "For staff and students, we can't very well tell them what to do with that (social media). We don't have a policy that says they can't talk to their peers," Perkowski said. Short of talking to students and asking them to stop if their posts are having a harmful effect on another student, Perkowski said the district has no control over what students post on their social media accounts once they get home. If a teacher or someone in authority can prove that a tweet or Facebook post was uploaded on campus during school hours, only then would the district have more teeth when addressing the issue. But for a former Carlsbad High student, who the Current-Argus agreed not to identify, talking to her school principals and even Carlsbad police officers didn't help. The student, who graduated in May, said someone created a Twitter account in her name using a picture of her from her Instagram account. "They were making me look like a bad person in my name," the CHS alumnus said. The account user posted mean things on other people's accounts and made the student appear as though she thought she was better than everybody else. The former student said she believes she may have been a target of cyberbullying because she had a lot of friends and people knew who she was because she played sports. She emailed Twitter three times and followed the company's process for requesting that an account be shut down, but she had no luck, she said. She still doesn't know who's behind it, so she said she's choosing not to blame anybody and forget about it. And as far as the validity of the information posted on "Carlsbad SLUTS" and other means of cyberbullying, Pierce said she doesn't know if the tweets/posts are truth or fiction. "It's tough to say, and it depends on the situation. Things can get easily exaggerated, and people want to make themselves feel better or make (another) person look worse."