Why is Online Bullying More Prevalent?

Why Is Online Bullying More Prevalent?

On most days I spend time posting on the CBSSports.com website with people that I have become “pseudo friends” with over the past 5 years.  We use this site to converse over topics ranging from last night’s baseball games to the upcoming presidential election to bizarre and funny news topics.  Today, as I was going through my daily routine of reading sports I was taken aback by the ugliness of some of the forum posts written by my fellow posters. 

To be fair, these posts were posted on the “Off Topic” board on a sports website, where topics range from brilliant to absurd and are mostly discussed with humor and wit.  However, somewhere, somehow, during the recent past the humor and wit has taken a nasty turn towards bullying by individuals and groups of individuals.  I kind of think of it as a Lord of the Flies scenario where people are following a mob mentality.  Today a poster accused another poster of being gay.  A little strange since it is an anonymous site and the accused poster has never posted personal information.    More than likely the poster was trying to get a rise out of the individual but he would not let it go.  There was post after post about the guy being gay.  And after a while other posters began to get into it and began targeting the individual with what I assume were lies. 

Is this a huge deal?  Probably not, but you just don’t know.  However, it helps illustrate the negative side of anonymous posts on the internet and it piqued my curiosity on adult bullying and the internet. Unfortunately after researching through the academic resources provided to me through Regis University it is quite clear that research on Adult internet bullying is in its infant stage.  The main focus of cyber bullying research focuses on teens and is being researched nationally by organizations such as the Cyberbullying Research Center and the National Crime Prevention Council. 

The numbers associated with cyber bullying provided by these organizations are staggering.  Bullyingstaticstics.org, which gathers data from multiple sources, estimates that over 25 percent of American adolescents and teens have been repeatedly bullied through cell phones or internet.  And less than 10% of those bullied will report this to a parent or an adult. 

With the instances of adolescent and teen bullying numbers being so high it’s not hard for me to understand why I’m seeing increased instances of adult bullying online.  It's unfortunate that the internet has led to a loss of civility and this loss has started to turn me off from using a social tool that I have used over the past 5 years.

Bullying Statistics.  (2009).  Adult Bullying and Cyber Statistics.  Retrieved fromhttp://www.bullyingstatistics.org/