Self-harm plays a big role in cyberbullying, it is a way for the victim to cope with their pain. Not only can the victim have self-harm or suicidal thoughts the effects of cyberbullying impact the number of teens inflicting harm on themselves. Over the years that we have been struggling with, they have made so many movies on cyberbullying, to show us how bad cyberbullying is. The 2011 movie Cyberbully, it portrays 3 young female teenagers navigating their way through high school and throughout social media. The depiction of social media and the horrors that come with it carefully takes audiences with the main character being bullied and harassed online by an unknown user. Taylor, the main character comes to a breaking point because of the amount of harassment and bullying, she decides to attempt suicide. Fortunately, Taylor survives and finds out the truth to which she brings awareness of cyberbullying to her school. Unlike Taylor, many teens die from suicide because of bullying online. Watching this movie was very sad and made me think about how real these situations are and how it can be so damaging to any person. Everyone needs to know about this and be aware when they are online and see things that are out of the norm, speak up, report it to an adult, or call 911. By speaking up and informing someone, you could save someone’s daughter or son.
Also, not only does cyberbully happen to girls, but happens to boys, transgender, and the LGBTQ community. There are just so many people that don't agree on the same things and they act out of anger and they are full of hatred because they don't want to see someone succeed. It's sad to say that there are so many people like this in our world and yet there have been so many movies out and you think that by seeing this, they would stop.
Over 60% of students had reported that this tremendously impacted their ability to learn and go to school (Hinduja). Being bullied is something that we all need to be aware of and take action when we see or hear about it. If we were all aware of what is going on around us we could be such a big help in stopping the problems our world has
This topic is so important because there are so many teens today that are always facing some kind of bullying either at school or online. Some ways we can prevent this from happening is having parents keep track of their children’s usage online, having schools come up with new policies and training kids how to prevent it, improving social media networking, everyone should keep their profile on private, he or she should keep track of dates and evidence of cyberbullying and report it (Hinduja & Patchin, 2014). An article that I found on how “Instagram 'Implicated' In Teen Suicides As It Prepares To Merge With Facebook,” by Zac Doffman, talks about how Instagram was to blame for a grieving father’s daughter who died of suicide. Because Instagram along with other social media sites was hosting and distributing content that was contributing to mental health issues and suicides. The Forbes article interviewed the father of a daughter named Molly Russel, “the more I looked, the more there was that chill horror that… had been such profound effects on my lovely daughter. We went to one account Molly was following and what we found was just horrendous. They seemed to be completely encouraging of self-harm, linking depression to self-harm and suicide, making it seem inevitable, normal, graphically showing things like cutting, biting, burning, bruising, taking pills.” Instagram makes it so easy for users to make fake profiles or even post very harmful accounts/images, and this can easily trigger anyone who is going through a rough time such as cyberbullying or being bullied at school. Instagram along with other social media platforms can really take a toll on young American teens for the worst; as I was reading some articles on cases of avocado media impacting teens I came across one and as I was reading it I realized that social media seems not to care or take action when things happening on their platform. The news article NBCNews, published a story about a 15-year-old girl with red and braces who had killed herself in June because of bullying at school and on all social media platforms by her peers. Her aunt Sadie Smith said, “she was tormented on Facebook, Instagram, messaging platform Kik — where classmates would tell her to kill herself.” She did everything she can do to help her niece to stop the bullying but no one helped her, “I went to the police. I went to the school. I even contacted Instagram headquarters, and they didn't do anything about it (Elizabeth Chuck),” this just shows how social media platforms don’t do anything to help stop bullying, they see it occurring on their platform but don’t take stand and they keep saying we need to end bullying and cyberbullying but they don't even take action, until it’s too late to handle for the victim and they end up committing suicide because of how bad they are being bullied.
Cyberbullying is a worldwide problem and suicide is a vast impact on today’s generation. Technology has adapted so fast, therefore, improving social media, and can influence so many American Teens because they are so attached to their phones. American Teens cannot live without their phones; if you were to take a teenager's phone they would not know how to survive because they live there life by their phones always attached to them. No individual should feel like they need to hide from being worried about being taken advantage of.