Adolescents on Social Media: Aggression and Cyberbullying

Abstract

Background. The aggressiveness of social networking is a significant component ofthe risk modern teenagers face during socialization, and cyberbullying is one of themost controversial forms of aggressive behavior on social media.Objective. This paper deals with the study of secondary school students’ behavioron social media. The parameters characterizing teenagers’ usage of social media— their activity, intensity, motives, and self-presentation — are analyzed withrespect to gender, age, and social psychological factors. The main focus is teenagers’personal experience dealing with aggressive situations on social media: their rolein aggressive situations (as aggressor, victim, or witness); the form of aggression(public or private); the aggressor’s characteristics (acquaintances or strangers, persons,or groups); and their views on what action victims should take (ignoring it,confronting it, or asking for help).Design. This article is based on data obtained by researchers at the Center forSociology of Education of the Institute of Education Management of the RussianAcademy of Education in 2020–2021. Using a specially developed questionnaire,we collected responses from 40,575 students from grades 7–11 in 17 regions ofRussian Federation through an anonymous online survey. Mathematical statisticalmethods were used for data processing, specifically, the chi-square test in the “Basicstatistics-Difference tests” module of the “StatSoft Statistica 7.0” package.Results. The data showed that the adolescents with high status among theirclassmates (“leaders”) used social media as an important educational resource,while those with low status (“loners”) used it to compensate for their poor reallifeexperience. Aggression on social media appears to be quite common amongadolescents. The traditional differences between male and female subcultures appearedin the choice between private or public forms of aggression. The increase inaggressive interactions with strangers as the youth aged indicated that the realizationof the teenage distinctive basic need for “expanding one’s social environment”in online interaction comes with the risks of encountering unfriendly, aggressivereactions.