Social media is a generally new way of socializing with the use of devices to communicate, post, and receive feedback for those posts all in the matter of seconds.
Everyone remains connected through elaborate social media applications, each platform having their differentiating and unique qualities. It is understandable the appeal of using these methods of communication since most millennials and new generations are using different social media platforms from the start of their lives. However, people fail to understand the negative aspects of changing socialization, deliberately going against human’s most useful trait: speech. One of the most significant traits of humankind that distinguishes us from animals is our ability to have elaborate cognitive speech. The change from real-life social encounters to digitalizing socialization undoubtedly presents issues for one’s mental health and social skills besides the other negative aspects such as cyber bullying.
Social media is proven to be addictive as well as cause social disorders, but it also makes cyber bullying so much more effective. Bullying is the act of harming, intimidating, threatening, or coercing a person, typically seen from kids in school who victimize someone who is less fortunate. Cyber bullying on the other hand is in some ways worse. It allows bullies to follow victims home and terrorize them through the use of social media. Being threatened through a screen can be extremely horrifying, especially if it’s done by an anonymous user. People can be manipulated, exposed, and harassed in all kinds of ways and have it done in the simplest of ways without even showing their face. This is why cyber bullying poses such a threat to society. The limits for cyber bullies are endless and can play with victim’s lives with ease, which plays a part in why social media is so dangerous. Cyber bullies can be anyone and not only be people who harass others through their devices but they can also use social media as a means to finding where others are through posts and location tracking applications such as snapchat. Cyber bullying poses a great threat to social media users and should not be taken lightly as it is people’s mental and physical health in the balance.
Being victimized by another human being through the means of cyber harassment can be very demeaning for people. We were all created equal and should be in everyone’s morals to uphold that equality on a day to day basis. However, there are those who choose to hate on people who they assume are of lesser social status or other “defining” attributes. Whether these people are malignant people or just playing some sick joke is irrelevant. What this is describing is bullying. Nowadays bullying has taken on various forms but the one form that seems to be of constant use is cyber bullying. In today’s technologically advanced era cyber bullying can be done by a toddler with an ipad due to its simplicity, however people are and have been seriously affected mentally and physically due to this online harassment.
Cyber harassment is such a broad spectrum that there is theoretically endless ways of harassing others. Threatening messages, tracking applications, catfishing, and exposing others are just the tip of the iceberg. Growing up, we’ve all witnessed bullying in our schools and how school officials attempted to secure the students from this harassment. However, cyber bullying exceeds the limits of school officials and is much harder to protect victims from it. This creates a massive dilema. Being a victim of cyber bullying can cause major self esteem issues, depression, insomnia and countless other mental health issues. According to the journal JAMA Psychiatry, “subjects were more likely to develop a psychiatric disorder that needed treatment as an adult, compared to kids who were not bullied”. So the myth that all children experience bullying growing up can be put to rest because as demonstrated by the journal JAMA Psychiatry, children bullied growing up can experience mental health issues at adulthood, which is obviously not what nature intended.
The negative mental health effects due to cyberbullying are not only due to fear of bullies and what they do to disrupt victim’s lives but also because they are subjected to isolation from peer groups when being bullied by a person or group. People, usually teens suffer from depression, anxiety, and insomnia due to social media and cyberbullying. Despite millennials having a somewhat addiction to the use of social media network, the use of cyberbullying within these social platforms make the symptoms worse. Millennials have a constant need to be on top of what happens on social media, keeping them and their peers connected. Experiencing harassment through social media can cause rumors spread to peers causing humiliation and exclusion in peer activities and social circles. Being excluded from something is never a good feeling but exclusion from an entire peer group in school for example is much worse and can leave the victim with long term mental health problems.
Social media has morphed bullying into an entirely different dilema. Social networking allows bullies to extend their hatred from real life, face to face encounters to digital harassment that can be done at any time and any place. Bullies can use information on social media against victims, such as location, friends, and routines within their day. However, there can be events where cyberbullying takes place when it’s not a planned out course of action by a bully. However, these events can still cause horrific consequences. Tyler Clementi was a shy 18 year old Rutgers University freshman with a passion for playing the violin who jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge on September 22, 2010. His last words, that he posted on his Facebook profile before he died, were: “Jumping off the gw bridge sorry.” This occurred after a sexual encounter he had with a man in his dorm and was allegedly video streamed all over the internet without Clementi’s knowledge by his freshman peers Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei. This is a tragic story of a cyberbullying experience which caused a suicide of a young boy over nonsense drama done by a couple of foolish teens. However, these “bullies” fail to realize the everlasting effects that are caused due to cyber abuse, which in this case was death which those teens will have to live with for the rest of their lives.
Kids are more likely to keep social media bullying to themselves despite telling an adult being the right course of action. They fear that “snitching” may cause more problems with bullies. The book Cyber Bullying : Protecting Kids and Adults from Online Bullies by authors, Samuel C., III McQuade, , James P. Colt, , and Nancy B. B. Meyer agrees with this in the following quote, “The code of silence that predominates as an aspect of digital youth culture is the risk or an expectation of cyber bullying, as well as other types of abusive and offending behaviors committed by people, who relatively speaking, are friends and/or strangers online. This reality is consistent with false hopes that regardless of the technology used to interface, people can actually know and trust each other not to abuse them, but in any case not to report incidents when they do occur. Hence, youth and young adult victims of bullying, including witnesses of bullying, rarely, if ever, tell adults in positions of supervision or authority. Fear that telling may make the bullying worse, and that telling brands someone as a snitch cannot be overemphasized.”
Bullying in the past is nothing compared to the modern day. Cyber bullying was originated with the creation of the telegraph. Monitors were easily able to eavesdrop on conversations stealing private information and being able to use it as they please, such as spreading rumors. With the technological revolution and the creation of social media cyberbullying progressed into what it is today. As mentioned before social media is something admired by youngsters because it allows peers to connect through an elaborate database loaded with information. Social media is a bully’s playground. The way technology has become incorporated within society in our everyday practices has manipulated bullying, making it easier to discover personal information and communicate with people with just a cellular device. With the introduction of new social networking softwares coming into play it is getting more difficult for officials to try to stop the effects of cyber bullying. Cyber bullying is a complex problem and is not a simple fix.