Technology Threats:Impacts of Cyberbullying to Today's Generation

This study is aimed to examine the impact of cyberbullying in the 21st century generation, how social media and technology contributes into the rising cases of cyberbullying. Studies were carried out in two folds. (1) We carried out online surveys on a small cohort to record general experiences of cyberbullying on social network platforms and we report our findings using qualitative and quantitative data analysis techniques. (2) We classified tweets into `bully' and `non-bully' based on the presence of bully related words in the tweets and develop a model using NLP techniques in order to flag new tweets which are bully related. The findings of the study indicated that most participants use their social media platforms daily with a high proportion of them using Facebook, WeChat or WhatsApp. The results of the study also reflected that cyberbullying is real and affects victims emotionally, physically and mentally and most people disregard the impact. This study contributes to the knowledge of research in this domain and can be used to flag tweets which contain fowl words or attack individuals for the necessary action to be taken, consequently, to reduce cyberbullying in online social networks.