Negatives Of Cyberbullying

Everyone, or at least most of everyone, has heard of bullying, been bullied, or even became the bully themselves. According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, bullying is the abuse and mistreatment of someone vulnerable by someone stronger or more powerful. In the American school system, children and teenagers have been exposed to bullying. Now, with technology becoming more influential and more of today’s youth having access to social media sites, they are more vulnerable to bullies online. This is called cyberbullying. Where bullying tends to end when the victim has gotten away from bullies, this is not the case for victims of cyberbullying. When the victim goes home, the brutal comments and messages follow them around, never allowing them to

Thanks to the internet, many aspects of life have changed. The internet has brought with its birth many positives and negatives. Cyberbullying just happens to be one of those negatives. Like traditional bullying, the main ones involved tend to be adolescents in middle school and high school. As teenagers are now allowed smart phones and have access to social media sites such as Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter, there is now a larger pool for bullies to pick their victims. A lot of the time, the bullies are someone the victim knows. Often it is more than just one person online doing the bullying, which can make the victim feel overwhelmed. The victims are often targeted for simple meaningless flaws. These flaws can be anything, ranging from being overweight to being too nerdy or sometimes the victim is picked just because they are there. In many cases, cyberbullying starts out as traditional bullying but is transferred online after school hours are over. This keeps the victim under the bullies’ power at all

Bullying a person can cause an array of problems. For example, if the victim is overweight and being bullied because of that, they could begin to starve themselves in the hopes of losing weight to stop the bullying. Other victims become disgusted with themselves, begin to be paranoid about how others think about them, and feel overwhelmed when being cyberbullied because the bullying never stops. Studies show that the victim can also suffer from anxiety and depression due to the lack of self-confidence and self-esteem that has been broken down from cyberbullies. It is also stated that the victims can become suicidal from this. When an adolescent is continually surrounded by the cyberbullying, they begin to feel helpless and hopeless. This feeling of helplessness leads the victim to believe that there is only one way out, and that way is suicide. Another example, in the ABC movie “Cyberbully”, Taylor Hilldrige, a victim of cyberbullying, decided there was no point in continuing her life because of what the bullies where saying about and to her. There are no words to describe how the families feel when this happens, knowing that there is virtually nothing they can do about the cyberbullies that caused this incident to