UPSTANDERS AND THE EMOTIONAL EFFECT OF THE HAUNTING BLUE TICKS
Keywords:
cyberbullying, dynamic relationship, upstanders, blue ticksAbstract
Most of today’s youth communication happens
online, thus representing a big part of their lives. Commuting
from offline to online communication, creates a bunch of
difficulties, misunderstandings, gaps, in other words not
realizing how our words are being received. When online
communication goes wrong, in terms of youth virtually
hurting other youth - bully-victim situations - there are always
witnesses or bystanders who participate passively and do not
take action. An upstander is a person who participates in an
online aggression and acts, standing against any act of
injustice or intolerance and intervening on behalf of a person
being attacked or bullied. Our research team has developed
the project Keeping youth safe from Cyberbullying, ID 2016-
3-TR01-KA205-036619 aiming to deeper understand the
dynamics of different cyberbullying aspects in online
environments among youth, by creating an online
questionnaire composed by single item research, questions
related to core concepts and perceptions about cyberbullying
motives and effects. Our focus is in analyzing the effects of
“seen†messages emotional impact on upstanding behavior in
cyberbullying incidents, in 507 high school students from
Romania, Belgium, Turkey and Spain. Results show that
when modelling effects of “seen†messages on upstanding
behavior, the curvilinear model (3%) is more consistent that
the linear model (2%), even if both models show statistical
significance. Psychological and methodological conclusions
and implications are discussed.
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