The Brand New Face of Cyberbullying

As soon as teenagers were gifted the internet, they used it to digitise their bullying. During the mid-2000s I saw boys leak nudes of underage girls onto Facebook to humiliate them; collage videos of girls' holiday photos, with nasty captions; slut-shaming or homophobic comments posted under selfies. On Formspring – the site that allowed people to post anonymous or named comments on your profile – girls would receive rape and death threats.

Back then, there was a fluidity between online and offline bullying. Taunts that started at school would make their way into comments; those leaked nudes would be printed and posted on lockers and lining the walls like a walk of fame; bullying that happened in person was filmed on low-res, early-gen phone cameras and shared around. The bullying was more visible, to peers, parents and teachers, who zoomed in on what they saw – disciplining others if the abuse happened on school property.

Nowadays, according to those I've spoken to for this article, the vast majority of bullying takes place solely online, and is arguably even more insidious and widespread than it's ever been.

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Claire, 24, had a Piczo site – a bit like Myspace, but with more tacky graphics and a guest page where anyone could comment, anonymously or not. "I'd get a lot of mean comments about my appearance on there, especially my bigger than average nose," she says. This co-existed alongside the "relentless" bullying she experienced offline. "At school and around town, I'd be hit, spat at, yelled at, my hair pulled. My house was egged a few times, too."

Twenty-three-year-old Brianne* was also physically and verbally abused in person as a teen, as well as suffering a few bursts of online abuse. "I'd suddenly get 20-plus messages telling me to kill myself over Facebook and Formspring," she says. "It's one thing to get your backpack thrown into a lake, or bottled, and another thing to get a constant barrage of faceless people telling you you're worthless. There's nowhere to put your anger, nowhere to shout back if they're in the cosy safety of their own homes, away from consequence."

My experience of cyberbullying during that period was that it was seeped in blatant misogyny ­– both from men and internalised misogyny from other teen girls. Young women, along with other minority groups, had firmly embraced social media, seeing it as an opportunity for public-facing self-expression. The openness with which we shared – selfies, uploading whole albums of bikini shots from holiday, blogging diary entries, creating profiles on sites with the sole purpose of allowing people to anonymously criticise us – made us more vulnerable than we could ever be offline, and the prospect was too alluring for people who took a disliking to us.

The saving grace was that it was only 2006 or 2007. Social media was still something you disconnected and connected to; it wasn't there in your pocket at all times. "I only had access to the internet for an hour or so a day, at my parents' discretion," says Claire. "If I'd had an iPhone with limitless data, it would've been much harder to escape." Brianne* agrees: "I don't think the standard bullies at my school knew how much damage they could do via the internet at that point. If I was a teenager today, I don't think I'd survive, because it'd be constant. Nowadays, your internet presence is part of you, almost, which makes me feel really strange. Then, I could still switch off and delete everything."

The nature of the abuse, however, has changed. The teen girls I spoke to for this article all thought offline abuse was less consistent than online, for the obvious reasons of it being easier and less messy. As teen girls are online all the time, this means the abuse is more pervasive.

One 15-year-old, Rhiannon, describes online bullying as a "drip feed" of negative comments and messages, rather than a "repeated huge thing". As everyone is presenting across various platforms – Depop, Twitter, blogs, Instagram and so on – people who have never met you in real life are more likely than ever to be giving you abuse, anonymous or otherwise. Faceless misogynistic male commenters have become a force of their own.

One seventeen-year-old girl, Charli* – who has thousands of followers across multiple social media platforms – summarises why she thinks girls still get more online abuse than boys. "When you are a girl online, you have to be prepared to face scary people, pervy people, rude people, people who are awkward with girls… It's just kind of how it is and how it always has been, unless you keep it a secret that you aren't a boy.

"I think more people need to keep this in mind and have their guards up online, because as much as I'm sure everyone wishes it could be, it isn't exactly a 'safe space'."

Seventeen-year-old Lucia was bullied over Facebook and Twitter when she was 14. Although the source of the issue originated in real life ­– a girl at her school liked her then-boyfriend – the abuse was carried out online. "They'd never say anything to my face, only when I was in earshot. She got all her friends to continually send me horrible messages from anonymous accounts, telling me to kill myself and hurt myself," she says. "I'd block the accounts and they'd just start new ones." As she's got older, any comment abuse has moved over to Instagram, so she's started a private account and is "very wary" about which accounts she accepts as followers.

Rhiannon, 15, told me that lots of teens – girls, particularly – have "spam accounts": private Instagram accounts that only close friends have access to. "You post a couple of times a day or more about what you're doing, wearing, look like. Sometimes it's videos too," she says. Scrolling through some accounts I've been allowed to follow, I can see they're messy and unedited, a space in which to post without fear. They are very – to use the mid-2000s term – random. Rhiannon then has a heavily-curated public account, only updated about once a month with what she wants people at school to see.

The separation of content allows an element of control over other people's access to her life. "If people from my school saw my spam I'd get a lot more shit at school than I do, because it's just stupid things they make fun of me for," she says. "I have a friend who had a spam last year and people from school found it; they kept saying all this mean stuff about her she didn't want them to know, but she didn't realise [for ages] they had found it."

In the same study, nearly 31 percent of the 10,000 British young people surveyed said they have been abusive online towards other users, while only 12 percent admitted to bullying in general. So there's clearly a disconnect in the perception of what constitutes bullying. The study also found that 54 percent of people surveyed have experienced some type of bullying, and that 33 percent of that figure experienced cyberbullying "often" or "constantly". From that, you can only assume that many are experiencing each side of the coin, bullying and being bullied.

Rhiannon admits to playing both roles: "I know I used to indirect people. There was one girl I used to post [to], saying 'get your own life' all the time," she says. "I'm friends with her now, but I was such an arsehole at the time. I was very unhappy in myself." Charli* agrees: "Not even gonna lie, I'm guilty of this. It's just a lie if people deny it too."

More surprising is that anonymous commenting sites haven't died out as cyberbullying has become more relentless. Formspring was the most popular in the mid-2000s, but now Ask FM, This Crush, Curious Cat and others have popped up in its place, and many teen girls seem to love them still. Rhiannon has a This Crush profile, which invites people who fancy you to tell you anonymously: "You get horrible comments about your appearance, or I get some about my make-up or my voice, or that I try too hard, or that they don't know why anyone likes me."

But she won't leave the platform – it'd take something "really bad" to convince her to – because of the positive comments. If anonymous faceless accounts are ripping you down across all your other social media accounts, then what's the big deal about adding another account to the mix that also provides you with the occasional bit of positive attention and validation?

Why does this matter? Young victims of cyberbullying are twice as likely to attempt suicide and self harm. Perpetrators of cyberbullying are 20 percent more likely to have suicidal thoughts and attempt suicide, too. We also know that girls are now far more likely to stop taking part in a debate or conversation online, for fear of being criticised. Social media has a huge impact on the way in which girls see themselves – almost half of girls admitted they felt pressure from social media to look or act a certain way. It's a grinding down and way of policing girls, the impact of which we have no idea.

Claire told me that as a result of being bullied on and offline as a teen, she is still wary of what she chooses to put online as a woman. "I won't put up a picture or be tagged in one where I look bad. I also use FaceTune to give myself a smaller nose in lots of photos," she says. "I'll always make my friends delete ugly ones because I know I'll obsess over them and create scenarios in my head where people are screenshotting them and sending them around."

The "drip feed" effect makes cyberbullying harder to police than ever. How do you call out a constant stream of negging, undermining and cruelty any more online than you feasibly could offline? Brianne* thinks growing up online explains the way that now-adults use social media.

"There's no empathy on the internet," she says. "It's turned adults into passive aggressive bullies. It gives them access to put people down without justification if necessary. Sometimes I don't even think people notice they're doing it. We're continuously negative about things that literally don't matter – it's really exhausting."

What girls these days face might not be as creative as passive aggressive Myspace essays and entire photoshopped video projects, but the abusive culture built around and reflected on social media is sadly only getting more and more pervasive. Toppling it will take more than a teacher's intervention or a block button could – or will – ever manage.

*Names changed as cyberbullying is ongoing and girls didn't want to provoke further abuse.

@hannahrosewens

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