On the day of October 17, 2006, a young girl, Megan Taylor Meier, committed suicide by hanging herself. Her suicide was connected to cyber bullying through the social networking website MySpace. Megan could not live through the shame and humiliation from facing disrespect from the fake account harassing her, made by her friend’s mother. Being at a vulnerable age, she was very receptive to public opinion and therefore she ended her life. Some say words hurt more than violence and seen by this tragic scenario, cyber bullying backs this statement up.
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 a matter of seconds.
Everyone remains connected through elaborate social media applications, each platform having its 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 it 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.
Bullying tends to occur due to an imbalanced sense of power. Bullies are commonly known to victimize people who are emotionally vulnerable or weaker individuals. Unlike traditional bullying, cyber bullying can occur without perfecting a perfect time and place and can reach a person when he or she is supposed to be within the safety of their home. Besides, cyber bullying can be more detrimental because hurtful messages and photos can be easily shared online while the perpetrator can remain protected and anonymous. Bullying inevitably increases symptoms of depression and anxiety. According to the ALSPAC cohort in the article Adult mental health consequences of peer bullying and maltreatment in childhood: two cohorts in two countries, by Suzet Tanya Lereya, William E Copeland, E Jane Costello, Dieter Wolke, “Children who were bullied by peers only were more likely than children who were maltreated only to have mental health problems in both cohorts with differences in anxiety, depression, and self harm between the two cohorts.”(Whiteman, Honor. “Social Media: How Does It Affect Our Mental Health and Well-Being?” Medical News Today, MediLexicon International) Parental support has been found to decrease depression symptoms, which is usually an issue for those who decide to keep their bullying experiences to themselves rather than let it out to a parent or even a trusted adult or friend. Both bullies and victims are at an elevated risk of depression at adulthood as well as other mental health problems such as panic disorders or suicidal thoughts.
Cyber harassment is such a broad spectrum that there are 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 dilemma. 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”(“Anxiety, Depression & Suicide: the Lasting Effects of Bullying.” Healthline, Roberta Alexander, Brian Krans, Healthline Media). 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 most definitely not what nature intended.
Social media usage is extremely common for younger people which is why the risk of cyberbullying through the means of social media is so great. Kids’ minds are not fully developed at that age and when experiencing cyberbullying they can be at risk of developing various mental health problems that are likely to progress into adulthood. In the article, Cyberbullying on Social Media Linked to Teen Depression written by Stephanie Pappas it’s stated: “Victimization of young people online has received an increasing level of scrutiny, particularly after a series of high-profile suicides of teenagers who were reportedly bullied on various social networks.”(Pappas, Stephanie. “Cyberbullying on Social Media Linked to Teen Depression.” LiveScience, Purch)
The author attributes suicides to a social media platform called Ask.fm where users could anonymously ask and answer questions. The article also states “Two studies examined the prevalence of so-called “bully-victims,” meaning teens who both bully others and are bullied. Research on offline bullying proves these kids to be most at-risk for mental health problems.“(Pappas, Stephanie. “Cyberbullying on Social Media Linked to Teen Depression.” Fox News, FOX News Network)
The experimental article, Cyberbullying Linked With Range of Mental Health Effects, conveys that after taking a look at 50 people in a psychiatric hospital ranging from ages 13 to 16, the ones who had experienced cyberbullying also faced symptoms of depression, anxiety, irritability, and anger. It clearly states ‘“Those who were victims of cyberbullying were more depressed, they were more irritable and angry, and they were more likely to not feel like themselves than those who were not victims of cyberbullying,” Dr. Saltz said.’(Airov, Terri. “Cyberbullying Linked With Range of Mental Health Effects.” Psychiatry & Behavioral Health Learning Network) Most of the patients were also daily social media users and were associated with experiencing cyberbullying through their social media. Therefore, bullying undoubtedly is responsible for anxiety and depression. The more short term the issues are is usually as a direct effect of short-lived bullying experience. Many researchers concluded that bullying can cause severe problems. For example, it is stated in the article How Teen Bullying Affects Short-Term and Long-Term Mental Health, written by the light program that “Numerous research projects have concluded that bullying can cause serious mental health issues in teens. One study of 16,410 secondary school pupils showed that people involved in bullying were more likely to suffer from depression and to have suicidal thoughts.”(The Light Program. “How Teen Bullying Affects Short-Term and Long-Term Mental Health.”), In the long run, it can be much worse. People bullied can experience symptoms later in the future. This is evident by the following quote from the article, “Bullies and their targets may struggle to develop and maintain interpersonal relationships. Lack of self-confidence and self-esteem affects educational achievements and income potential. One research project showed that targets of bullying earned less at age 50 than their non-bullied peers”(The Light Program. “How Teen Bullying Affects Short-Term and Long-Term Mental Health.”) This is why bullying is such an issue in today’s society. Especially with the increase and innovation of technology that makes it extraordinarily easy for people to begin harassing others.
The negative mental health effects due to cyber bullying 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 cyber bullying. Despite millennials having a somewhat addiction to the use of social media network, the use of cyber bullying 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. This can all be accomplished from a simple push of a send button that can forward an embarrassing picture to peers.
Social media has morphed bullying into an entirely different dilemma. 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 the information on social media against victims, such as location, friends, and routines within their day. However, there can be events where cyber bullying 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 an 18-year-old Rutgers University student 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 was after a sexual encounter he had with a man in his dorm and was videotaped and posted all over the internet without Clementi’s knowledge by his freshman peers Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei. This is a tragic story of a cyber bullying experience which caused 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 is 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.” This is proof that kids are not likely to expose their bullies and let them face the devastating consequences of their actions. This is due to a so-called “rule” between peers that basically forbids snitching for most things especially wrongdoings. These people have the fear of being shunned if they expose a wrong doing despite it being harmful to their own health. Having that said, the issue of cyber bullying is more reluctant to being stopped due to this so-called “code of silence”.
Suicide with younger people is a major issue in our modern society, and people seem to think that it is mostly caused by some sort of bullying. However, according to the Department of Health & Human Services suicide does not have a direct relationship with cyber bullying. However, cyber bullying is just another weight that pushes the risk of suicidal tendencies. Suicide can be a combination of bullying, mental illness, substance abuse, poor coping skills, and family dysfunction but is not solely a result of bullying, despite how horrible it is to be bullied. Despite that fact, cyber bullying still plays a role and without the addition of cyber bullying in people’s lives, suicidal tendencies would be minimalized. People who are victims of cyber bullying are between 2 to 9 times more likely to consider suicide than non-victims, according to studies by Yale University. The article also states “Suicide is the third leading cause of death among young people, resulting in about 4,400 deaths per year, according to the CDC. For every suicide among young people, there are at least 100 suicide attempts. Over 14 percent of high school students have considered suicide, and almost 7 percent have attempted it.”(“Bullying and Suicide.” Bullying Statistics) This is insanity that a “kid’s fooling around” can result to such devastating problems, which demonstrates the malignancy of bullying.
Bullying in the past is incomparable to the modern day. Bullying was apparently part of every child’s stage of growing up and didn’t seem to worry parents from a little name calling or some fights. With the technological revolution and the creation of social media cyber bullying 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 software 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.
Social media networks have been gaining users over the years increasing its popularity and use in our day to day lives. This creates the requirement of these platforms to ensure the protection of its users. Instagram has reported that it has approximately 800 million users, and Facebook surpassed 1 billion daily users. This is an enormous amount of people that are at risk of cyber bullying which is why these media platforms began looking into ways to protect their users from the hostility of cyber harassment. Most social media platforms have included a feature in which people are able to report inappropriate posts and have them evaluated by appropriate people to decide whether to remove the post, leave it, or consider more aggressive action if the post is hostile.
Due to the technologically advanced era, we live in, social media platforms have been preparing their apps to protect the privacy and safety of its users. They incorporated many cyber bullying prevention software in hopes of decreasing the risk of cyber harassment. For example, the popular social media platform known as Twitter has made it more difficult for cyber bullies to attack. According to hughesnet, “Now, the platform makes it more difficult for permanently banned users to find loopholes in the system and create new profiles under different names. In addition, according to Digital Spy, if Twitter users have tweets that are flagged as offensive, circulation of their tweets will be limited to their followers only.”(“Social Media Tools to Help Stop Cyberbullying.” HughesNet) However, Twitter is not alone in trying to create a safe environment for its users. For instance, Instagram allows users to do disable commenting on their posts to limit negativity from outsiders. Likewise, snapchat sends an alert to users who had their post screenshotted by others. This provides accountability for people trying to use the screenshot in a negative way that can be considered cyber bullying.
Besides the report function that almost all social media platforms have included, there is a software called ImageVision which basically scans for keywords in people’s posts that may be related to hostile or threatening words. In this case, it marks the post for it to be later checked out by a human operator to make the final decision about the post. Approximately 10 to 40 percent of kids have experienced cyber bullying and even more social media users have witnessed these acts of aggression. This is an outstanding statistic, that approximately almost half of users have been a victim to cyber bullying, and is why social media platforms are trying their best to create a realistic, cost-efficient way of combating cyber bullying.
Social media is a very controversial topic. Many people have debates over both qualifying negative and positives of social media. However, if really considering the issue, the situation directly compares to weapons. Weapons are heavily destructive things, yet the weapons aren’t the killers. A weapon is simply a tool and can be used in various ways. People, on the other hand, are who pull the trigger or swing the knife. A knife can be used to prepare tasty dishes or kill people but it is the choice of the person wielding the knife who makes the call. Similarly, social media is just a tool. It can be used in various ways: creating relationships and staying in touch with people who otherwise we would be unable to contact. On the other hand, some nefarious individuals strive to use social media as a weapon, hence using cyberbullying as a means of victimizing people with a powerful tool that makes it much easier to harass people because you can do it from across the world by interacting with a screen.
Social media has been a mode of communication that is widely adopted in the modern world. Technology rules our world. Communication via the internet has never been easier. Social networking is a mode of communication that allows us to keep in touch with hundreds to even millions of people. You get “friends”, followers, networking, and professional connections. You are “linked in”, being “tweeted” at, you are a blogger, YouTuber, you are “friends” on Facebook or on WhatsApp. The reality of keeping up with so many people would not be possible without social media. Our world became smaller and connections tighter. Good and bad found their place in social media the same way as it finds it in realms of the streets, schools, workplaces. Of course, being on social media provides us with opportunities that are greater than we could ever imagine. We can enlighten the world and share our experiences, teach how we create, or learn a thing or two, share our pictures or share recipes. The opportunities are endless. With new technologies, there are new opportunities for stalking, “trolling”, “ghosting” and spying on other people. However, new technologies are neither bad or good. They are inventions that help us get our lives better, or could them worse. The choice is ours, whatever we chose, technology will help us to fulfill it.
Monday:
My research covers the idea of cyber bullying, which included what cyberbullying is, the different forms of cyberbullying, negative effects of cyberbullying on mental functions, and how social media platforms are attempting to confront cyberbullying. This is helpful to our group topic: health and care on social platforms, because cyber bullying is a major issue in today’s society due to the technologically advanced era. Bullying is a lot easier to do due to social media and my research covers how big of a problem it really is along with ways media is trying to solve the issue.
Works Cited:
https://www.psychcongress.com/article/cyberbullying-linked-range-mental-health-effects
https://www.hughesnet.com/why-hughesnet/blog/social-media-tools-help-stop-cyberbullying
https://www.livescience.com/51294-cyberbullying-social-media-teen-depression.html
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/bullying-affects-victims-and-bullies-into-adulthood-022013
http://www.bullyingstatistics.org/content/bullying-and-suicide.html
http://www.bullyingstatistics.org/content/bullying-and-suicide.html
https://www.educationnews.org/k-12-schools/expert-say-bullying-does-not-lead-to-suicide/
https://www.flagsacrosstheworld.com/bullying-and-suicide-statistics/
https://thelightprogram.pyramidhealthcarepa.com/how-teen-bullying-affects-mental-health/