What is cyberbullying? Examples, effects, and prevention tips

What is cyberbullying?

Cyberbullying is a type of harassment that involves sharing abusive, untruthful, threatening, or otherwise harmful content online with the sole purpose of hurting or humiliating a person. It exploits the vulnerabilities of the bullied people to instill a feeling of worthlessness and shame and, often, isolate them from their community.

One way bullies try to hurt their target is by sharing digital content without consent. For example, they may collect old pictures that someone might find embarrassing and share them on public channels or post screenshots of private conversations revealing sensitive information. Alternatively, cyberbullies may engage in denigration – the use of misleading and false information, like digitally altered images, to harass a person.

Bullying on social media

Social media plays a big role in cyberbullying. Algorithm-based platforms like TikTok or Instagram allow bullies to share compromising images with a broader audience outside of the target’s immediate social circle. Seeing this, strangers can participate in the bullying without personally knowing the victim or the initial bullies, leading to a herd mentality.

Bullying and mobbing

When bullies join together to harass the same person, they become a mob. As a unit, they form private online communities and are usually more coordinated and organized than individual bullies. Their style of attacking one target collectively is known as mobbing.

Mobbing is also a common type of psychological harassment in the workplace. It puts pressure on the victim by isolating them from their team and creating a hostile work environment. Employees who dislike one person interfere with their work, sabotage their projects, refuse to collaborate, and can lie to management or falsify performance results to force the person to quit their job.

What is the difference between cyberbullying and traditional bullying?

Traditional, or in-person bullying, and cyberbullying can sometimes overlap — physical bullying can turn into online harassment, or vice versa. Traditional bullying is usually physically charged but can cause psychological trauma as well. The bullies deliberately injure and humiliate their victims, isolate them from their peers, or use verbal abuse to demean them. These attacks tend to stay within a confined social circle — the bullying target usually knows or at least can recognize their bullies, and an explicit display of violence makes it easier for bystanders to notice the situation and interfere.

Cyberbullying can also be used in traditional bullying, for instance, by harassing the victim through text messages or calls. However, in cyberbullying, the distance between the attacker and the victim is greater — it can occur among people who have never met in person and may not even live in the same region or country. Bullies are more likely to remain anonymous, and the victim might not know who was harassing them even when the attacks stop.

Cyberbullying has a bigger reach than traditional bullying. Bullies can target the same person on multiple platforms at the same time and choose to act privately or publicly. Public attacks can escape the victim’s social circle and spread into online communities.

A big part of cyberbullying is media sharing. Bullies post photos and videos of their target, often private, to humiliate them. This media doesn’t have to be genuine, and using edits, photomanipulation, or AI-generated content to embarrass the person is just as common. Sometimes, these images go viral, exposing the victim to public humiliation.

Victims who have in-person witnesses can more easily name and get help to stop traditional bullies. Identifying cyberbullies is harder, but not impossible. Their actions leave behind a digital footprint, which can eventually lead back to their personal information and help expose who’s hiding behind anonymous accounts.

Traditional bullying

• Familiarity: Perpetrators are usually known in person
• Scope and area: A smaller circle of people
• Medium: In-person, can be partially online
• Acts: Name-calling, spreading rumors, excluding from social groups, teasing, intentional embarrassment, physical violence
• Digital footprint: Sometimes

Cyberbullying

• Familiarity: Perpetrators can be anonymous
• Scope and area: Can be broadly spread across different networks
• Medium: Online
• Acts: Anonymous messages, sharing of embarrassing content on social media, identity theft and impersonation, deepfakes
• Digital footprint: Always

How common is cyberbullying at work?

Research into workplace harassment and misconduct revealed that 79.3 million workers in the U.S. experience workplace bullying. Bullying is one of the leading causes of work-related stress because it’s often more implicit and psychological than, for example, bullying among children.

Workplace bullies might mask their behavior under company politics, act passive-aggressively, and pretend their aversion to their target is based solely on their professional performance. It might not turn into physical violence, which makes it harder to document and identify.

According to the study “Bullying and Cyberbullying in Adulthood and the Workplace,” conducted by Kowalski, Toth, and Morgan in 2017, 20% of respondents experienced cyberbullying at work. However, face-to-face bullying was more common.

Workplace mobbing gets more elaborate and often spreads outside the office, especially if the IT team monitors company-owned communication channels. It’s more difficult for the employer to interfere because they can’t prove that abusive behavior takes place only at work.

The usual outcome of workplace bullying is the victim quitting or being fired. Bullies might deliberately interfere with their work and then report poor performance to management. This can have long-term negative consequences on the victim’s career prospects.

A lot of bullying takes place in unrecorded virtual meetings, where one person can be singled out by a group and mocked for their performance without written proof. Having this proof can help report the perpetrators to HR or managers. Bullies involved in mobbing might create private channels and group chats that alienate their victims. If exposed, these channels are proof of abusive behavior and help punish the perpetrators.

Examples of cyberbullying 

Online bullying covers a range of actions taken online that can be considered abusive and harmful to individuals. Cyberbullying examples include but are not limited to:

• Sharing embarrassing or compromising photos, videos, audio recordings, or screenshots that feature or mention the bullied individual.
• Stalking the person on social media or deliberately interfering with their social circle.
• Impersonating the bullying victim or spreading lies and misinformation about them in an attempt to create a negative impression.
• Sending messages, emails, and other communication containing harassment, threats, or insults directly to the bullied person.
• Doxing (sometimes spelled doxxing), or exposing personally identifiable information about the victim without their knowledge.
• Outing, or revealing the victim’s gender identity or sexual orientation without their consent.
• Using digitally altered content, deepfakes, and AI-generated imagery to harass or impersonate the victim.

What causes cyberbullying? 

Each bullying case is unique. However, they can be grouped based on common threads.

Demographic factors

Age, race, and gender all play a big role in cyberbullying. Older employees can be mocked for their potentially slower pace and struggles with technology. Likewise, younger employees are more likely to be demeaned for what may be perceived as a lack of experience and underdeveloped professional skills. Racial discrimination veers into hate crime territory.

According to workplace harassment statistics, gender-based cyberbullying affects men and women roughly evenly. However, at 67%, men are more likely to be the perpetrators of cyberbullying. Online bullying against women at the workplace can fall into the category of social harassment if bullies spread compromising photos or videos of them online.

Mental and physical health status

Cyberbullying against someone with health issues is considered ableism. If the victim has a physical disability, bullies might remove accessibility tools to interfere with the work process. For example, they might switch off text-to-speech support, use illegible fonts or color pallets that strain vision, or play disruptive sounds. Cyberbullies might mess with the victims’ software, spam them with content that includes strobing lights that might provoke health complications, revoke access to important files, or deliberately delete and redo their projects.

If the victim has a mental illness or a personality disorder, cyberbullies might engage in antisocial behavior that triggers and provokes their symptoms. They can use insulting and demeaning language that provokes episodes of depression, openly mock them in anxiety-inducing situations like company meetings, or lie to them, building on distrust and paranoia.

Workplace culture

Sometimes, cyberbullying and mobbing are fostered by a toxic work environment. Around 65% of bullying comes from managers and trickles down to the lower-level employees. This creates hostile work conditions and prompts employees to mistreat each other in person and online.

Past experience with bullying

It’s not unusual for former victims of bullying to become bullies themselves. They might carry their experience from a previous toxic work environment or their personal life to their current workplace. This can be a retaliation for their hurt or a way to release anger if they haven’t developed healthy coping mechanisms. By harassing their colleagues, they perpetuate a cycle of abuse.

Online influence

Coworkers can be pulled into mobbing through herd mentality. Seeing that one colleague is constantly demeaned, they might fear becoming the next target if they don’t participate in the bullying.

Since online bullying can be done anonymously, employees might feel safer using their voice, transitioning from venting to explicit abuse. This anonymity acts as a shield from persecution and creates a sense of power — the longer cyberbullies go unidentified, the more aggressive their actions can become.

Effects of cyberbullying on victims

Cyberbullying can leave a strong emotional and psychological impact on the victims, causing anxiety and depression. You might feel shame from experiencing cyberbullying and close yourself off from people in your social circle or even grow distrustful and suspect the anonymous harassers are your friends.

If the cyberbullying goes beyond the immediate social circle and into the broader online space, strangers can also start ostracizing the victim. This can lead to doxing, where the person’s identifiable information like full legal name and home address are exposed to the public. This can put the victim in physical danger and devolve into in-person bullying or worse.

If you’re harassed for your gender identity, political views, or societal status, you might be the target of a hate crime. Experiencing extreme harassment caused by cyberbullying and doxing can force the victim into relocating from the address made public and cause them to suffer severe psychological distress.

Workplace harassment is isolating because it directly impedes collaboration efforts. Such bullies create a hostile environment and actively work against the interests of the person they’re harassing. The victim can experience feelings of job and financial insecurity, which increases stress. They may worry about their professional image and career prospects. The impact on their work performance can force them to lose opportunities like promotions or take  extended leave due to health concerns as well as lead to quitting or getting fired.

Legal consequences of cyberbullying

Cyberbullying as a whole is frowned upon but not outright illegal. However, some of the actions bullies take are considered crimes. For instance, stalking, doxing, or impersonating another person is illegal. If cyberbullying actions lead to in-person harassment, such acts can fall under the umbrella of assault.

Workplace harassment in particular may lead to the demotion or termination of employment for the perpetrator. However, according to workplace bullying statistics, the perpetrator quitting or getting fired is one of the rarest consequences, at 3% and 9%, respectively.

If you, as a victim of workplace harassment, can successfully prove bullying or mobbing is taking place, you might be able to sue the perpetrators. If the ruling is in your favor, you may receive financial compensation for the damage you experienced, whether  your earnings, mental health, or physical health have been impacted.

If the cyberbully attempts to blackmail you, threatens to expose your sensitive personal information online, or impersonates you, they’re committing a crime that can lead to prosecution. Lately, bullies have been turning to deepfakes and AI-generated images to harass their targets. Although AI-related laws are still emerging, these acts may also fall under identity theft and online harassment.

What to do if you’re being cyberbullied

What you can do to protect yourself as a bullying victim will vary slightly depending on whether the harassment is anonymous or not. If you’re being harassed anonymously, you can report hateful messages to the platform being used for cyberbullying. The content moderators may then review this content and shut down the harassers’ accounts. You can also block anonymous accounts and, where possible, restrict access to your personal information. Adjust your privacy settings and review your friends lists to remove suspicious accounts.

If you know the harasser’s identity, you can directly report them to web administrators or the police depending on the severity of their actions. For instance, if they’re blackmailing you or threatening to dox you, you can gather these messages as evidence and submit them for further investigation. If you suspect that the harassment might escalate to impersonation and misuse of your personal information, you can get NordProtect’s identity theft protection service to monitor your credentials on the dark web, track your credit activity for any irregularities, and alert you as soon as it spots suspicious activity.

If you experience cyberbullying in a workplace, it can fall under mobbing or cybermobbing. In this instance, you should gather evidence of harassment and report it to your manager and the company’s HR. If the situation can’t be resolved internally, you might need to escalate to labor institutions and authorities. If someone is attempting to extort you, you may be able to receive cyber extortion protection.

If you feel that cyberbullying is impacting your mental health and wellbeing, contact a mental health professional. They can provide dedicated resources for victims of online harassment. If you don’t feel confident enough to confide in someone face to face, you can anonymously contact a helpline.

How to prevent cyberbullying

Cyberbullying is an alienating experience by design — the harassers want to instill a feeling that you’re not part of any communities in real life or online. Preventing cyberbullying before it occurs in the first place takes emotional intelligence and honest communication.

Some people find that the social norms of in-person communication don’t apply online. Under the guise of anonymity, they act ruder, harsher, and more aggressive than they would talking to someone face to face. Reporting hateful messages early on can block their future attempts to hurt you or anyone else online.

Knowledge and understanding of digital footprint can be key here. Even if bullies try to remain anonymous, their harassment can eventually lead back to their own keyboard. Awareness about how you communicate online, what you share, and how you share it helps you stay safe and helps keep users from falling into abusive communication. Social media platforms deliberately offer the ability to report abuse specifically — it protects their own community standards and makes it easier to identify instances of cyberbullying.

How you can protect yourself if you’re being bullied

A lot of your digital experience is down to how you manage it. You can terminate an abuse scenario by blocking messages and accounts and restricting access to your personal information. However, the onus should not be on the victim — the abusers need to know what communication rules they’re breaching and receive sufficient consequences, whether that’s account restrictions and full IP bans or legal repercussions.

Social media has rewritten the rules of online communication and collaboration. It blurs the boundaries between the personal and the professional, even when it comes to harassment. The key step in preventing cyberbullying is being open and honest about unpleasant experiences and not staying quiet when red flags of targeted harassment first emerge. Like traditional bullying, cyberbullying aims to keep the victim small and quiet. The most effective thing you can do is stand your ground and be loud about it.