According to psychologists from the University of California, Los Angeles, bystanders online are commonly unsupportive when cyberbullying victims share deeply personal feelings.
Bystanders online have been known to be less active with intervening compared to their counterparts in real life and Jaana Juvonen and colleagues wanted to know why this is so, so they set out to study 118 people in the United States, the results of which they published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior.
For the study, the psychologists made a fake Facebook profile for an 18-year-old girl called Kate, who got a nasty comment on one of her posts. The comment "Who cares! This is why nobody likes you" got six likes and was posted by someone named Sarah.
The participants, who were recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk, were between the ages of 18 and 22. They were split randomly into four groups, each group seeing Sarah's comment as a response to a post on Facebook from Kate. However, each group saw Kate's post as either positive or negative and disclosed varying levels of personal feelings.
Two of the groups saw a personal post from Kate regarding a relationship skewed to be either positive or negative: "I love it when you like someone like crazy and you think they might like you back" and "I hate it when you miss someone like crazy and you think they might not miss you back."
The two other groups saw a less personal post from Kate about "Game of Thrones," also phrased to be either positive or negative: "I love it when a Game of Thrones episode ends and you can't wait until next week to watch more" and "I hate it when a Game of Thrones episode ends and you have to wait a whole week to watch more."
Participants were then asked to answer questions regarding how much they think Kate deserved to be cyberbullied, how emphatic they were with Kate and what were the chances that they would support her.
Most of the participants consider Sarah's comment as cyberbullying but their responses varied depending on Kate's post. But whether or not the Facebook post was positive, the participants looked at Kate negatively when it was more personal.
"Our study suggests oversharing of personal information leads bystanders to blame and not feel for the victim," said Hannah Schacter, the study's lead author.
Juvonen added that young social media users have to understand that talking about personal issues publicly online makes them vulnerable to attacks from cyberbullies. Overall, a close friend is a better outlet than the internet, when it comes to voicing out personal feelings.
Photo: Barn Images | Flickr
