Assessing Text Classification Methods for Cyberbullying Detection on Social Media Platforms

Cyberbullying significantly impacts mental health by adversely affecting victims’ psychological well-being. It is a prevalent issue on social media platforms, necessitating effective real-time detection systems to identify harmful content. However, current detection systems face challenges related to performance, dataset quality, time efficiency, and computational costs. This study compares existing text classification techniques for cyberbullying detection, evaluating their effectiveness on social media platforms. Large language models such as BERT, RoBERTa, XLNet, DistilBERT, and GPT-2.0 are assessed for their suitability. Results show that BERT achieves optimal performance, with 95% accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score; a 5% error rate; 0.053 seconds inference time; 35.28 MB RAM usage; 0.4% CPU/GPU utilization; and 0.000263 kWh energy consumption. These findings highlight that while generative AI models are powerful, fine-tuned models often outperform them when adapted to specific datasets and tasks.