The role of cyberbullying on social media

The role of cyberbullying on social media

There is absolutely no doubt that social media is used by a large amount of the world today. Because of this, there is so much constantly happening on social media that things tend to fly under the radar quite often. One of the biggest things that people condemn social media platforms for is Cyberbullying.

What is cyberbullying?

Cyberbullying, as defined by Wikipedia, is a form of bullying or harassment done electronically. Per an article from Bark.us about the history of cyberbullying says that a form of cyberbullying started as soon as personal computers became more common in households across the world in the early 1990s. However, it wasn’t until 2007 when one of the first cyberbullying cases made it is way into the mainstream media. Today, there are 44 states that have cyber harassment laws that include cyberbullying laws. 

Cyberbullying’s role on social media

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Since social media is such a massive part of today’s world, there is no easy way for social media platforms or the companies that run them to monitor everything on the site. Because of this, social media has become a very popular place for cyberbullying to occur. It’s easy for people to say or do whatever they want to when very few people are watching. It’s easy for people to make fun of people or hurt them in some way or another.

Cyberbullying can happen anywhere. While it is more common for it to happen through social media, it can easily happen over things like texting, online chatrooms, or through online video games. Things such as name-calling, making fun of people, mocking people, calling them defamatory remarks, among many other things.

The first official cyberbullying case

Once again from the same article from Bark.us, the first official case of cyberbullying was in 2007. This unfortunate case was only called to attention due to what happened leading up to the case. 13-year-old Megan Meier committed suicide after two neighbors created a fake MySpace profile and used it to harass her. Because of this case and a few others, laws were formed in an attempt to prevent cyberbullying.

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Harassment laws

44 states have laws that directly talk about harassment, many of them mentioning cyberbullying and cyber harassment as well. Findlaw.com has a list that roughly breaks down each of these 44 states’ laws about cyber harassment. Florida’s laws prevent bullying of any K-12 student or staff member. This law even includes direct references to cyberbullying. This law doesn’t include sanctions for this act. It states that schools should draft policies and report any of the instances of bullying.

Since cyberbullying is such a massive part of our world, what are some ways that we could help to prevent it? While it seems like a simple fix, simply adding more monitoring to social media sites wouldn’t solve the issues. It would be more efficient to implement better laws and proper sanctions against cyberbullying. This would help to show people what would happen to them when they are convicted for cyberbullying. It could possibly dissuade them from cyberbullying and committing these crimes.

Cyberbullying is a terrible thing and there are many steps that we must take as a world to get away from it. However, with how prevalent of a topic cyberbullying is these days, it will continue to get better each passing day.

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