Article Preview
Top1. Introduction
In recent years, instances of cyberbullying have increased. In 2013, the U.K had an estimated 5.43 million young people, who had experienced cyberbullying. Amongst those young people, 1.26 million had been subjected to extreme cyberbullying occurring on a daily basis (Ditch the label, 2013). Cyberbullying is the use of information and communication technology to harass and harm in a deliberate, repetitive, and hostile manner (Stopbullying.gov, 2014). Table 1 presents the various methods of cyberbullying and demonstrates how much the online world has provided a platform for cyberbullying.
Table 1. Types of Cyberbullying Adapted from (Willard, 2007)
Available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, the online world enables cyberbullies to launch constant cyberbullying attacks against their victims. With technology use so prevalent in society today, it is difficult for cyberbullying victims to escape these attacks. Cyberbullying attacks happen on various media platforms, including email, text messages, webpages, social networking services (SNS), chat rooms, digital images, and online games (Kowalski, Giumetti, Schroeder, & Lattanner, 2014). One of the most popular mediums for cyberbullying attacks is SNS.
Twitter is an SNS that focuses on microblogging and allows users to send short messages to other users. Twitter has gained popularity in recent years and currently has 310 million active monthly users (Twitter, 2016a). On Twitter, short messages sent to other users are called Tweets, which are limited to 140 characters. Tweets often contain hashtags, used to index topics and keywords. URLs are also included in tweets to reference other websites. A reference to another user through the displaying of their username in the body of a tweet is known as a mention. In comparison, a reply is a response to another user but their username is placed at the front of the tweet. Replies can also be considered mentions (Twitter, 2016b).
One of the main purposes of posting tweets is to spread information quickly. To spread information, users post tweets to their followers (other users of Twitter who have agreed to receive a person’s tweets). Consequently, followers can retweet the tweet. A Retweet is “…a re-posting of a Tweet. Twitter's Retweet feature helps you and others quickly share that Tweet with all of your followers. You can retweet your own Tweets or Tweets from someone else…” (Twitter, 2016c). A tweet which has been retweeted can be identified by the notation ‘RT’ which appears at the beginning of the tweet. If a user has many followers and they retweet a tweet to their followers, information can potentially spread quickly (Redfern, Ingles, Neubeck, Johnston, & Semsarian, 2013).