Problem-Solution Social Media Bullying Among Students

Social Media Bullying Among Students
The recent years have shown dramatic increase of social media use. Social media are digital platforms that allow users to interact with one another through creating and sharing content through the cyberspace. Not all of this content is good, some of it could be harmful or even damaging to someone, which can be used for bullying. Bullying by definition is an aggressive behavior with the intent of overpowering the victim. Now that bullying has been taken to the social media space, this has become a problem, because social media bullying could leave longer or even permanent damage to the victim’s morale. However, the problem could be remedied through a three-pronged approach: first, performing basic social media options available for the bullied in order to stop the bully. Second, is education on digital citizenship responsibilities. Last, but not least is to cultivate youth resilience against bullying through peer facilitation.
Anyone could fall victim to social media bullying. For the purpose of this paper, we would confine this to social media bullying among students. This was more harmful than physical bullying due to several factors. First was the speed at which negative contents could reach a large number of audiences, as this was done through social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. What could make this worse was the factor of familiarity of the bullied to their bullies, which could aggravate humiliation. Last, but not least was that these negative contents were preserved in the cyberspace through digital sharing, liking, etc., re-inflicting the same damage over and over again for the bullied.
In the most recent 2018 study on social media bullying in the US, out of the 5,700 middle and high-schoolers of nationally representative samples, 33.8% had been bullied in the social media during their lifetime, while 16.9% were bullied in the social media in the past 30 days. The 11.5% admitted having bullied others during their lifetime, and 6% had done so in the last 30 days (Hinduja & Patchin 3). These were alarming numbers of social media bullying because more and more students were utilizing the social media interactivity. In the US, 95% of students were online and had access to their mobile Internet (Hinduja & Patchin 4). Based on these numbers, it is no wonder that students were susceptible into falling victims to social media bullying or even became bullies themselves, as being online would make feel one anonymous, having little chance of being detected or identified. It continued to persist because the bullies were thinking that they were doing it for fun. They were doing this because they could, and the poor victims could only cower in the corner and cry. Another reason this persisted was that the bullied themselves were not standing up for themselves against these bullies. This was why an understanding adult supervision was needed for the bullied to cope up with his or her situation. If not solved, social media bullying could diminish a student’s self-worth, as the negative contents posted online against him or her already condemned him or her into being an outcast by “society.” Nobody wants to feel an outcast, as it could rule nega...