Examples of Cyber-Bullying

With all the new technology in place, cyber-bullying can come in many different forms. Listed below are some of the most common.

E-Mail: Cyber-bullies can send unsuitable content to others including degrading pictures, or videos of other teens. Harassing and/or threatening messages can also be sent. Accessing someone else’s account to forward personal emails or delete emails is another way email can be used. Cyber-bullies will often use their victim’s email address and sign up for e-mailing and instant messaging marketing lists, particularly to porn sites.

Instant Messaging (IM) / Texting: With instant messaging and texting through cell phones, cyber-bullies can send harassing, threatening, and hateful messages to their targets. Text attacks can happen which is when kids gang up on the victim, sending numerous amounts of text-messages to the victims’ cell phone or other mobile devices. A child can create a screen name similar to his/her victims’ which can then be used to say inappropriate things to other users while posing as the victim. Videos and images can now also be sent to others with instant messaging and cell phones.

Web sites: Cyber-bullies sometimes create web sites that insult, mock or endanger another child. Posting other children's personal information and pictures is one way to put a child at risk.

Blogs: Blogs are online journals. Children sometimes use blogs to damage other kids' reputations or invade their privacy. Sometimes children set up a blog or profile page pretending to be their victim and post things designed to humiliate them.

Internet Polling/Voting: Some web sites offer users the opportunity to create online polling/voting booths. Questions such as who is the ugliest, fattest, dumbest at ***** school are found too often on the Internet and are yet another way that children can "bully" other children online.


STOP cyberbullying: Direct attacks. Retrieved October 11, 2008 from http://www.stopcyberbullying.org/how_it_works/direct_attacks.html

www.cyberbullying.ca: Examples. (2007) Retrieved October 11, 2008 from http://www.cyberbullying.ca/