Cyberbullying (Essay Sample)

Cyberbullying
Name
Institution
Abstract
Cyberbullying generally refer to acts of violation of another party’s rights, privileges or privacy through online virtual content creation, sharing or comment on social media or email facilities. Although there are few legal cases and legislations that currently regulate online activity, cyberbullying is criminal and punishable. It leads to a victim’s loss of reputation, deprivation of useful rights and privilege and other forms of violations which demean the personality or personality of the victim. There are demographic, etiological and historical considerations pertinent to the menace of cyberbullying. This paper enumerates the intricate connections between these variables and how such connections may be useful in formulating approaches to preventing cyberbullying.
Keywords
Epidemiology of cyberbullying, aetiology of cyberbullying, cyber bullying among teenagers and young adults.
Introduction and Description of Topic
Although cyberbullying could be a recent problem created by online communities and advanced through the Web 2.0 Technology that enables the burgeoning social media sites, its extent of penetration and reach in society is already a matter of a social crisis. Social networking in a positive sense and with meaningful collaboration through social media technologies is indeed productive (Li, 2006). However, when individuals use these technologies to impersonate, to attack and molest others, it can be very highly reviled. Most teenagers recently record episodes of cyberbullying either in the form of emails, unwanted short messages on telephone devices and other avenues. It is recorded that most of the time the victims are younger females and the manner of abuses are random in nature. Age, ethnicity and other socio-economic variables greatly influence the manners in which cyber attacks are perpetrated and affected through various platforms.
Literature Review
According to a recent review, the social media sites are acknowledged for helping democratize the internet. Social media thus has both prominent positive and negative impacts in various ways to users even if these are not in the form of direct attacks or direct solicits of interaction (Keith & Martin, 2005). Cyberbullying should thus be conceptualized on the basis of a wide variety of participatory checklists regarding the intentions of the perpetrators and the nature of their approach to abuse a victim. In addition, digital devices that have various functionalities of text messaging, web browsing and other technologies have led to a very highly active and interactive online population yet they are inadequately prepared to deal with the challenges of the internet.
Epidemiology of Persons Affected
It has been established that nearly 80% of U.S. citizens are online and a good population of the same have elaborate social media profiles. During the last political and social upheavals in many Arab nations dabbed the Arab Spring, the social media was regarded as one of the most utilized facility for social mobilization and aggrandisement of social and political sentiment among the youth and students (Hinduja & Patchin, 2008). In the United States, 81% use social media to check weather news, 73% for national news, and 52.3% use it regarding sports updates and outcomes and about 40% use it for connecting with celebrities. The use of social media is central to cyberbullying because it is the foremost avenue through which cyberbullying takes place or is reported. Furthermore, the use of social media in terms of time of usage grew by a 99% between July 2011 and 2012 from 66 billion minutes to 121 million minutes of usage time (Campbell, 2005). This growth is a pointer to the reality that cyberbullying is growing too and must be addressed considerably.
Given social media sites like Facebook have a considerable influence among the youth and adolescents. It has been noted that among the school children, Facebook in particular is a major source of distraction and there is intense bullying taking place on the platform. Cyberbullying is more pronounced among the teenage girls more than any other group. The disparity between boys and girls is significant between the sexes.
Aetiology of Cyberbullying
Cyberbullying occurs as a result of several mediating factors in virtual human interaction. The fact that abusers can hide their identity or use forged and unauthentic identity is the leading cause of the reasons why cyberbullying is rampant. Cyberbullying is also promoted by the fact that abusers are aware there are very few legal nets and technological mechanism through which they can be traced and netted (Smith et al, 2008). The fact that privacy means diverse implications to diverse people is another cause of abuse because some people do not regard simple messaging as abusive while others endemically do not acknowledge messages from strangers in the cyberspace. In this regard, social and economic considerations play a critical role in the definition of what really amounts to a substantial abuse. Cyberbullying could also result when others use the content of another source and intend to impersonate them. The menace is also perpetrated when people lose their trustworthiness among other friends particularly when they reveal inconsistent intentions later on in the interaction. It is a salient form of blackmail.
In an elaborate report by the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2013, social media do not account for any significant contribution as a source of credible information for users (Belsey, 2005). This means that most of the time, users expose themselves to adverse harm and social contact which has not so much benefit in terms of information gain. It is documented in the report that 27% of blog readers do not acknowledge the authenticity of the content.
History and Recent Research on Cyberbullying
The history of cyberbullying is not an ancient one. In fact, cyberbullying only started to emerge in the 21st century when the internet and the social media technologies gained adequate popularity among users globally. Neve...