The Solutions To Prevent And Avoid Cyberbullying

It is the 21st century and the world we are currently living in is full of technologies. In every aspect of our daily lives to our jobs, we mostly use technologies as a sort of support. We use technologies everytime and everyday such as our gadgets and laptops. Currently technologies are used as a sort of support to us, for example our gadgets can be used as an entertainment and laptops can be used for getting information. Basically technology has changed the world. Before getting any further first thing first, what is technology? According to the Oxford Dictionary, technology is a scientific knowledge used in practical ways in industry. It is used in almost every aspect being health, education, agriculture, sports, economy, and so many more. Seeing as how impactful technology is to our lives, it is safe to say that currently we will not be able to live properly without the use of technologies.

Having technologies in our lives provides us with many benefits. By using technology we can have easier access to information and a much more improved healthcare. Other than that, the one thing that almost every people use nowadays is social media. Social media is a sort of website or application that can be used for people to share or create their own content. Instagram, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat are a few examples of what social media really is. Social media is definitely something that is currently booming, with millions of users every day using it. In social media, people are able to freely express their feelings to other people and other people can also respond to that thought. But not all responses are positive, some may be a negative response that are set to target other people. These kinds of negative comments and responses are called online harassment and it has caused the destruction of many lives.

Online harassment is harassing people through mean comments in social media and other types of platform. It happened in multiple social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube. The target for these online bullies are basically people who are different from others, who are easy to make fun of. Sometimes people who have bigger bodies than the other are the target for these bullies as they can use mean words to harass them digitally. There are a few types of online harassment being online racism, cyberbullying, online predators, cyberstalking, and internet trolls. These online harassments had impacted a lot of people in negative ways and some had commit suicide because of it. One of the types of cyber harassment is cyberbullying.

By using technology bullying can now happen online without making contact with anybody in real life, that is what you call cyberbullying. Cyberbullying is an act of bullying through online communication methods such as texting or social media post to degrade, threaten, embarrass, or humiliate people. It usually happens in social media platform, where people can bully you without revealing their identities and stay anonymous. Cyberbullying had already made many people depressed and some even commit suicide. It is a dangerous problem that needed to be solved quickly so that less people can experience cyberbullying. There are eight types of cyberbullying which are outing, fraping, dissing, trolling, trickery, catfishing, doxing, and encouraging self harm.

The first type of cyberbullying is outing. Outing is when cyberbullies deliberately embarrass or humiliate an individual by posting or sharing their private, sensitive, or embarrassing information online. The second type of cyberbullying is fraping. Fraping is an act where a person gains access to someone's social media account and try to impersonate them in an attempt to be funny or ruining their reputation. Fraping is a serious offense that have severe consequences. The reason why fraping is such a serious offense is because once a social media post is posted it may be hard to delete it and fix the victim’s reputation. The third type of cyberbullying is dissing. Dissing is when people share or post cruel information regarding their victim. Dissing is used to ruin the victim's reputation or ruining the victim friendship with others. Some cyberbullies even made web pages dedicated to spread hurtful information and even sometimes lies. The fourth type of cyberbullying is trolling. Trolling happens when someone insults an individual to get a response. These kinds of attacks are personal and used to trigger anger in the victim, making the victim to behave badly on social media.

The fifth type of cyberbullying is trickery. Trickery is an act of gaining someone’s trust and use that trust to reveal the victim's secret, personal information, or embarrassing information. Then the cyberbully posts the victim’s information to social media so that everyone can see. Usually the cyberbully pretends to be the victim’s close friend or someone close to the victim to give the victim a false sense of security before breaking the victim’s trust. The sixth type of cyberbullying is sockpuppet. Sockpuppet is when someone creates a fake account to deceive other people. The attacker will then gain other people's trust by being someone who they’re not. From then on the attacker will try to get the victim’s personal information. The other form of sockpuppet is catfishing. Catfishing is very similar with sockpuppet. The attacker will create a fake social media account but instead of gaining the trust of the victim to gain personal information, catfisher will gain the victim’s trust to have a deceptive online romance. The seventh type of cyberbullying is doxing. Doxing is derived from the word “documents” and happen when the attacker threatened the victim by using their personal information. Doxing cyberbully uses the victim’s personal information such as security numbers, credit cards, phone number, and other personal data. The last type of cyberbullying is encouraging self harm. This act happen when the attacker encourage the victim to hurt themselves. Other than encouraging the victim to hurt themselves the attacker may also threaten the victim. This type of cyberbully may be the most dangerous as it may lead the victim to commit suicide.

After knowing all of the above, we can say that cyberbullying is an evil act, but why do people still do it? There are several causes of cyberbullying being revenge, anonymity, ignorance of consequences, social pressure, and boredness. The first cause is revenge, these days many people already experience bullying either real life or digitally. Some of the people that get bullied will try to bully others so that others can know the pain that they felt when they are being bullied. The second cause is anonymity. By having your face hidden people tend to bully others through social media believing that their true identity will not be discovered and will stay hidden. This is why most people prefer to bully digitally rather than real life. The third cause is ignorance of consequences. What it means is that, when people cyberbully they don’t see the victim’s reaction, which may lead them to think that their hurtful comment is fine and the victim are okay with it, but in reality the victim may feel depressed because of the hurtful comments but didn’t want to share their feelings online. The fourth cause is social pressure. This cause mostly apply to kids as kids tend to feel the need of being popular. Some kids may prove that they are “cool” by bullying other people, they will think that they will fit in with their peers by proving themselves “cool” through bullying. The last cause is boredness. Bored people tend to seek entertainment, and some will find cyberbullying as a source of entertainment. They do this to add excitement and drama to their boring lives. They will post many hurtful comments and think it’s funny when they see the victim’s reaction.

There are various effects of cyberbullying. The first one is the victim will feel overwhelmed. Being targeted by cyberbullies is crushing especially if the bully is more than one. The victim will feel very stressed and think that the situation is more than they can handle. The second effect is the victim feels vulnerable and powerless. Cyberbullying happen online and can make the victim feel not safe even in their own home as the bullying can invade their home through a computer or cellphone. Other than that, because the bullies can stay anonymous, the victim will feel fear as they don't know who the bully is. The third effect is the victim feel humiliated. Because cyberbullying happen online, many people will see the hurtful comment. All the hurtful comments, posts, and messages will be seen by numerous number of people, which may lead the victim to feel humiliated. Other than that, once a post is posted online, it will always be out there. The fourth effect is the victim will feel dissatisfied with their own self. Many cyberbullies tend to attack the victim where they are most vulnerable. As a result, the victim will feel they are worthless and have no value. For example, if a girl is called fat, she will start a diet believing that if she changes her appearance the bullying will stop. The fifth effect is the victim feel anxious and depressed. Cyberbullies attacks their victim through hurtful comments that may erode the victim's self-esteem or self-confidence. Because of that the victim will feel anxious as well as depressed believing all the hurtful comment sent by the cyberbullies. The sixth effect is the victim feel suicidal. This may be the worst effect as it can end someone’s life. Sometimes when the cyberbullies comments are too hurtful for the victim, the victim may feel that they are absolute trash and be better to just die. Other than that with the constant bullying of hurtful comments and posts, the victim may feel hopeless and thinks that ending their life as escaping the pain of being bullied.

Cyberbullying has happened for a long time and still exist to this today and there are multiple cases concerning cyberbullying. The first case is in December 2nd, 2016, a case where a girl named Brandy Vela commit suicide caused by cyberbullying. Based on CBS News Brandy Vela shot herself in the chest as her family member watched. Her family mention that the harassment mainly focuses on her weight. Her father, Raul Vela also mention that this harassment has been going for months from cyberbullies using an untraceable smartphone application, also the cyberbullies created a fake facebook account dedicated to harass her. Other than that the bullies created a website of her and put all of her personal information such as phone numbers and pictures in that website. As Brandy couldn’t take it anymore she ended her life by shooting herself in the chest and commits suicide. The second case is the case of Mallory Grossman who commited suicide because of the constant cyberbullying. Based on NBC News, Mallory Grossman, a 12 year old girl who commited suicide because her friends are constantly bullying her online. She was always harassed through messages, snapchats, and instagram. Her friends keep mentioning that she has no friends, she was even told, “why don’t you kill yourself”. The bullying was so severe that before she commited suicide she didn’t want to go to school, had chronic headache, and stomach aches. There are still a lot of cases of teens being harassed through social media. These cases proved that cyberbullying is a problem that needs to be ceased.

There are actually no solution to cyberbullying as it happen online which make the cyberbullies anonymous as well as there are already so many people doing it, it is almost impossible to track all of them. Instead of a solution, here are some ways to prevent you from getting cyberbullied. First, don’t ever share your personal information such as phone numbers, addresses, and others to anyone. By doing this the cyberbullies will not attack you as they prefer to attack easier targets with a lot of personal information posted online. The second prevention is to never trust anyone you met online as they are strangers. By doing this you can prevent people you met online from knowing your personal information. Third, is to ask for help if you are getting bullied. Don’t ever be scared to take actions or help when you are getting bullied, as getting help from an adult can be very helpful.

As a conclusion, cyberbullying is an act of bullying through social media or any online platforms that is intended to hurt others both emotionally and physically. It is a problem that needs to be solved immediately as it might be able to save more lives. Therefore, the author proposes several suggestions that might prevent cyberbullying, which are don’t ever share your personal information, don’t trust anybody you met online, and to ask for help if you are getting bullied. Hence by doing all of the preventions, we all would finally be able to eliminate the existence of cyberbullying.