You pick up your phone. Your first instinct is to open up Snapchat, Instagram, or TikTok, but this time you don’t. Instead you put your phone down and talk to your friends. Because what was waiting for you on these apps? Hateful messages? Insulting ques- tions? Well, it doesn’t matter now. When you put away your phone you take away its power.
Cyberbullying has been an issue for years, but it’s more prevalent today for many teens.
Add in the development of new social media apps and the cruelty of insecure adolescents, and the issue isn’t going away anytime soon. But this doesn’t mean this is an unsolvable problem. There are ways to help end this cycle of hatred passed on from one person to the next. NHS Resource Officer Jason Shonkwiler has some advice on how to cope with harmful media.
“The problem is that it’s all anonymous, and you can put horrible stuff on there. But the key to that is to just not care what’s on there,” Shonkwiler said.
On the internet, people are able to hide their identity with ease. Anonymity on social media acts as a shield for some adolescents to cover their identities while hurting others, leading them to believe what they do has no consequences.
Pollchat, a recently developed survey app, has led to multiple students at NHS getting bullied anonymously. The app allows for crude or offensive questions to be polled and then shared anonymously.
“You get on there, and you can say whatever you want, and you’re not saying it to the person’s face. So it takes a bit of humanity out of it,” Shonkwiler said.
Social media apps allow for a cloak of anonymity to be veiled over its users allowing participants to act cruelly towards unsuspecting victims. Not seeing the pain spread across the face of their victim allows for a user’s empathy to slowly disappear. But as Shonkwiler notes, a lack of reaction can sometimes discourage bullying, due to the fact that in most instances, what a bully wants is a reaction. While this can be an effective solution, it takes a toll on the person who must endure the bullying.
“Who cares what the Pollchat says? It’s better just to delete the thing. Because if someone’s bullying you on Pollchat or Snapchat, all they’re trying to do is get a reaction. They want to see that they hurt you,” Shonkwiler said.
Not caring can be a viable solution to this problem. But being a teenager, it’s almost impossible to not care about others’ opinions. However, someone shouldn’t worry about an opinion that they don’t seriously value. A student shouldn’t tolerate insults and hateful speech from a person they don’t respect.
“Back in the day, if school was bad, it stayed at school, it didn’t follow you. You guys can’t shut it off. So the most important thing for you guys to do is have a boundary” Shonkwiler said.
Shonkwiler understands how circumstances have changed when it comes to cyberbullying. Students who are now facing attacks like this have to face it constant- ly. It’s inescapable. Shonkwiler recommends building a boundary between yourself and your devices to prevent this pattern of hurt and pain.
To solve this problem that future generations will have to face, students need to change how they act toward others and how they regard themselves. Self-worth and confidence are important traits for everyone to possess. Without these characteristics, teens make themselves a target for cyberbullying.
