Adolescents on Social Media: Aggression and Cyberbullying

BACKGROUND: The aggressiveness of social networking is a significant component of the risk modern teenagers face during socialization, and cyberbullying is one of the most controversial forms of aggressive behavior on social media. OBJECTIVE: This paper deals with the study of secondary school students’ behavior on social media. The parameters characterizing teenagers’ usage of social media — their activity, intensity, motives, and self-presentation — are analyzed with respect to gender, age, and social psychological factors. The main focus is teenagers’ personal experience dealing with aggressive situations on social media: their role in 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 for Sociology of Education of the Institute of Education Management of the Russian Academy of Education in 2020–2021. Using a specially developed questionnaire, we collected responses from 40,575 students from grades 7–11 in 17 regions of Russian Federation through an anonymous online survey. Mathematical statistical methods were used for data processing, specifically, the chi-square test in the “Basic statistics-Difference tests” module of the “StatSoft Statistica 7.0” package. RESULTS: The data showed that the adolescents with high status among their classmates (“leaders”) used social media as an important educational resource, while those with low status (“loners”) used it to compensate for their poor real-life experience. Aggression on social media appears to be quite common among adolescents. The traditional differences between male and female subcultures appeared in the choice between private or public forms of aggression. The increase in aggressive interactions with strangers as the youth aged indicated that the realization of the teenage distinctive basic need for “expanding one’s social environment” in online interaction comes with the risks of encountering unfriendly, aggressive reactions. CONCLUSION: Communication on social media reflects an adolescent’s real-life interaction in school: those who have experienced psychological or physical bullying are more likely to become both victims and offenders in aggressive situations on social media. Th is transfer of group bullying from real life to the virtual can be seen as the main feature of adolescent cyberbullying.