How To Stay Safe In Social Media and Avoiding Cyberbullying

Article written by: Ashwanth Sundaramoorthi

Article designed by: Ashwanth Sundaramoorthi & Palak Tiwari

Picture this: You are online, in a group chat with many people chatting with each other, when you see somebody saying very mean things about another person in the group. What would you do in this situation? Multiple cyberattacks like bullying people online, making fake and duplicated accounts to frame someone, and other things occur in many day-to-day lives. There is usually a chance that people won’t know what to do when facing these problems, and it is important that they do know.

So what exactly is cyber bullying in the first place. With a simple definition, it is when people on social media platforms, group chats, or other online areas, bully someone or try to impersonate them while doing something bad. An example can be when a cyber bully makes a fake account that looks exactly like somebody else’s and then proceeds to do bad things online like bullying while lowering the reputation of the impersonated individual.

It is important and essential to realize the specific types of cyberbullying causes. Some examples can be things like low-esteem or insecurity, when bullies may not have enough self-esteem, leading them to want to bully others to feel powerful or validated. Rather than diminishing their bad feelings about something that had happened to them, bullies want to spread this pain around to other vulnerable people, making these people also feel depression, anxiety, and more.

While these causes are important to realize, the effects are just as useful to understand as well. Cyberbullying not only affects us physically, such as conditions like headaches or insomnia, but it also affects how we mentally act and think, like anxiety or societal pressure. We can feel pressure from situations involving getting bullied by somebody random online, and feel anxiety from situations where someone may be impersonating us online and setting bad examples with that account.

Fortunately, multiple solutions exist that can help with either solving the bullying problem or helping yourself reduce your stress or other worse feelings. There are many ways where you can mitigate this problem and avoid it from affecting you long term. The most important thing to do when immediately facing cyberbullying is to report/block the cyberbully, and inform any trusted adults about this situation. If you do this, not only would the bully be unable to cyber bully you, but there is a good chance they may be caught as well. To relieve your feelings of stress, anxiety, or others, the best thing to do is to take a break from social media to move away from the stress. The most cautious thing to do overall is to avoid speaking to strangers online in the first place and try to follow as much of the steps provided as possible.

Citations

• Nixon, Charisse. “Current Perspectives: The Impact of Cyberbullying on Adolescent Health.” Adolescent Health, Medicine and Therapeutics, vol. 5, no. 5, 1 Aug. 2014, pp. 143–158, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4126576/, https://doi.org/10.2147/ahmt.s36456.

• U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. “What Is Cyberbullying.” Stopbullying.gov, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 5 Nov. 2021, www.stopbullying.gov/cyberbullying/what-is-it.

  
  

• PACER's National Bullying Prevention Center. “Cyberbullying.” Www.pacer.org, 2022, www.pacer.org/bullying/info/cyberbullying/.