social media opens people to bullying and trolling
Although the general opinion was that social media use might increase stress and depression for some, conversely, they also suggested that social media can positively impact on wellbeing as it has the capacity to reduce stress. This suggests that it is the way that social media is used on those matters.
Social media as like an escape from if you’ve been revising for like hours then you can take your mind off it or whatever by getting on your phone or listening to music and stuff like that. (P3, Leicester, year 10, aged 14–15 years)
Um, it can be a distraction from the things around you and make you less stressed. (P2, London, year 8, aged 12–13 years)
Theme 2: social media opens people to bullying and trolling
As aforementioned, it is well-established that one of the consequential problems of the digital age is the rise of cyberbullying. A recent scoping review of international studies on cyberbullying showed a median prevalence of 23%, with social media being the main platform, alongside social networking and other applications (Hamm et al., 2015). Cyberbullying was an issue that participants talked about considerably and felt was a real risk to young people’s mental health and well-being. In so doing, they actively blamed social media for facilitating this aspect of adolescent life and was described by some as endemic to adolescent living. Notably, however, they rarely shared personal stories of their own bullying experiences and instead positioned their reports in the
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abstract, third-party way, reflecting the broader discourses of the phenomenon often found in schools and traditional media.
I feel like cyberbullying plays a huge part in everyday life. And that comes mainly from social media. (P4, London, year 11, aged 15–16 years)
It was argued by the adolescents that social media has provided a mechanism for others to engage in behaviour that constitutes bullying, which can in turn create a sense of isolation and negatively impact on emotional wellbeing. Furthermore, they recognised that by utilising social media, adolescents expose themselves to this kind of behaviour as this kind of behaviour was attributed to mainly coming from social media.
Another downside with social media is, um, say if you think that a picture is good, or other people think it’s funny you might get bullied, and you might not tell like your friends or you might not tell like an adult, um, that you’re getting bullied on social media. (P5, London, year 8, aged 12–13 years)
Um, yeah, it’s just bullies like say on the Internet, um, if you ask for help and they’ll say something then you think that no-one ever will help you, and there’s no way out of it. (P5, Leicester, year 10, aged 14–15 years)
These young adolescents recognised that while the very function of social media was to share aspects of life with others, for example, pictures, doing so can result in bullying. This behaviour was constructed as challenging to report you might not tell your friends or an adult. Furthermore, asking for help was seen as hindered by the bullies on the Internet. Of course, bullying has been a significant problem in schools for decades. Problematically, though, social media has created a platform for the consistency and continuity of the bullying behaviours and one that extends beyond the school boundaries. In turn, this means that there is almost no escape as social media invades life outside of school, perhaps even more so than in school.
In relation to cyberbullying, participants also discussed the problem of trolling. Trolling has been differentiated from cyberbullying with claims made that trolling is a spectrum of behaviour that ranges from largely offensive through to innocuous behaviour (Phillips, 2015). Trolling is a common problem for adolescents, and in a study of 2000 14- to18-year olds, it was reported that a third had been a victim of trolls, with a quarter being attacked regularly, and 1 in 10 confessing to instigating trolling (Rice, 2013), with trolls being characterized as attention-seeking, vicious, uneducated and having low confidence (Maltby et al., 2016). The consequences for mental health were argued to be severe.