In today’s society most everyone has access to a smartphone even children and adolescents. What happens when troubled teens or kids wanting to be seen as popular have access to these devices? Cyberbullying, which according to Coutts, Gruman, and Schneider (2017) is, “carried out in an electronic context through e-mail, text messaging, or social media venues like Facebook. It is distinctive from traditional bullying in that victims can be subjected to an attack almost anywhere and anytime, and without knowing the identity of the perpetrator—making it a particularly insidious type of bullying”. It is also important to note that cyberbullies can even create fake accounts pretending to be someone else in order to bully someone else, this is sometimes called catfishing.
I grew up in the era of smartphones which made accessing social media sites like Facebook and Instagram as easy as touching a button. I have seen firsthand what cyberbullying can do. I have a close friend who was being bullied on Facebook because she was popular, and a lot of other girls disliked her. So a group of anonymous girls made a page where they publicly bashed her and posted pictures of her at parties. This ruined her image and made people start spreading a lot of rumors about her. She did not attend school for a few weeks and had told me she was very depressed when all of this happened. Her mom worked at our high school we went to, and they ended up finding out who was responsible and made them take everything down.
As one can see the effects of cyberbullying can be very damaging. Especially in schools where children and adolescents are supposed to feel safe. Coutts et al. (2017) states that because of cyberbullying, “School is no longer seen as a safe environment in which the emphasis is on academic achievement and on building interpersonal skills and relationships. Students can no longer focus solely on their learning because they also must be very vigilant about who they interact with, where they walk, and who is saying what about them on social media.” This demonstrates the extent to which bullying can damage a child’s ability to do well academically. One thing that can help a child succeed is being in a school with positive classroom climates and teachers who care. This is an environment that is challenging for the student and provides timely response to questions and concerns. Another thing is making assignments clear and making sure all students understand what is expected from them.
Coutts, L., Gruman, J., & Schneider, F. (2017). Applied Social Psychology: Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems. (3rd ed.) Sage Publications
I’ve had similar experiences that have depressed me for a long time. I feel very tiny things are magnified by all sorts of things and even rise to personality and IQ. At first, there are people with you serious communication, to the back, ultimately turned into a group of netizens vent their sense of self-righteous superiority.
They start attacking you, from attacking problems to attacking individuals, and in short, you’re like their murdering father enemy, who looks at you everywhere.
Data show that cyberbullying is less likely to occur than traditional bullying. The best response should be to block the information and tell others.
Reference:
Peter K. Smith,Jess Mahdavi,Manuel Carvalho,Sonja Fisher,Shanette Russell,Neil Tippett, (19 March 2008) Cyberbullying: its nature and impact in secondary school pupils
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7610.2007.01846.x
With all the technological advancements cyberbullying has definitely increased. It is definitely easier for someone to hide behind a screen rather than saying it to someone’s face. When some show aggressive behavior online it can cause a ripple effect of more people joining in. I believe that this happens because people tend to follow what they see others doing, a learned new behavior (pg. 247). When one person starts to bully someone online the victim might start to get upset and angry then start bullying someone else online because they are hurting. It has also been shown that aggressive posts are more likely to be seen on the internet. So social media is making it that we see the more aggressive posts rather than the nice posts. This causes aggressive behaviors to grow online as people tend to learn new behaviors by observing and imitating others (pg. 87).
Gruman, J. A., Schneider, F. W., & Coutts, L. M. (2017). Applied Social Psychology: Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems (3rd ed.). SAGE Publications, Inc.
I also can agree with you on the fact of that cyberbullying is a huge problem. I have witnessed a few of my friends go through the same thing for no reason, or on the opposite end, those who were not popular or in a specific group, got bullied as well for no reason. Its upsetting to see this and now looking back and seeing other younger children still going through, its a shame to see it. There has to be more to stop this from happening rather than just telling students to not do it. Cyberbullying is serious already, therefore by one individual or multiple people ganging up on one innocent individual, this can put someone through a lot, especially a young child. I have came across a few news article last month of young children killing themselves at such a young age because they were bullied online through social media or video games. “Regardless of its form, bullying can have enormously damaging effects on their targets: depression, anxiety, poor performance at school, stress, lowered self esteem, and thoughts of suicide” (Gruman, et. al., 2017). In conclusion, “if students notice that teachers, staff members, and others in positions of authority ignore the harmful behaviors, then students are likely to feel that they are alone” (Gruman, et. al., 2017).
Reference:
Gruman, J.A., Schneider, F.W., and Coutts, L.M. (2017). Applied Social Psychology: Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems. SAGE Publications
Hi,
I agree with cyberbullying’s negative psychological effect on the growth of individuals. I see that social medium is a two-edged sword that provides the platform for freedom of speech but can also be exploited as a sharp weapon to harm the users. 95% of adolescents are connected to the internet in the US; the shift from face-to-face communication to online communication has created a unique and potentially harmful dynamic for social relationships. (Nixon, 2014) The journal article Current perspectives: the impact of cyberbullying on adolescent health implied that individuals involved in cyberbullying are more prone to experience physical problems, such as difficulty sleeping, headaches, and stomachaches, in contrast with their unaffected peers. The teens with double identities for both perpetrators and targets tend to encounter the most diverse health outcomes. (Kowalski, Limber, 2013) Social support is essential for healing the feels of helpfulness which mental health issues might cause. Friends and family could build a supportive environment to release the intension pressure and negative emotions by having an open discussion. In the school setting, the program “Linking the Interests of Families and Teachers (LIFT) could be applied as an intervention to decrease cyberbullying behavior. The program was based on Bandura’s social cognitive learning theory by teaching children and their parents nonaggressive methods of dealing with adverse emotional effects of conflict. (Gruman, 2017, p.248) Combining both the intervention with social support would be beneficial for taking care of one’s emotions and making the situation better.
References:
Kowalski, R. M., & Limber, S. P. (2013). Psychological, physical, and academic correlates of cyberbullying and traditional bullying. The Journal of adolescent health : official publication of the Society for Adolescent Medicine, 53(1 Suppl), S13–S20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2012.09.018
Nixon C. L. (2014). Current perspectives: the impact of cyberbullying on adolescent health. Adolescent health, medicine and therapeutics, 5, 143–158. https://doi.org/10.2147/AHMT.S36456
Gruman, J. A., Schneider, F. W., & Coutts, L. M. (2017). Applied Social Psychology: Understanding and addressing social and practical problems. SAGE.
I agree that cyberbullying is a serious problem today, especially considering that today we are far more reliant on social media websites than we were in the past. However, we, the users, are not the only ones that need to contribute to changing the online environment. Currently, social media companies like Facebook facilitate a negative online environment. As discussed by Chakradhar (2021) on NiemanLab, Facebook’s internal documents have actually revealed that the algorithm puts a heavy emphasis on posts that receive an angry reaction. If a post receives a high number of angry reactions, other users are far more likely to see it at the top of their feed than if the post only received likes. The system incentivizes posts that make others angry at one another, which would very likely include social media posts aimed at ridiculing certain people. When social media users see others who act aggressively towards one another, social cognitive learning theory predicts that others will follow those aggressive behaviors (Gruman, Schneider, & Coutts, 2017, pg. 247). The more users that are aggressive online, the more likely the next user that views their social media page will act aggressively, a cycle that results in a toxic online environment that encourages cyberbullying. Thus, while it would help if we could all practice more positivity online, it would be far more helpful to press social media companies into disincentivizing anger and facilitating an online environment that connects people and promotes the development of a positive online experience.
References
Chakradhar, S. (2021, October 26). More internal documents show how Facebook’s algorithm prioritized anger and posts that triggered it. Retrieved from https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/10/more-internal-documents-show-how-facebooks-algorithm-prioritized-anger-and-posts-that-triggered-it/
Gruman, J. A., Schneider, F. W., & Coutts, L. M. (2017). Applied social psychology: Understanding and addressing social and practical problems. Los Angeles: SAGE.