SOCIAL MEDIA INTERACTIONS AND THE EXPRESSION OF EXTREMIST BELIEFS. CASE STUDY: CYBERBULLYING IN THE ROMANIAN VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT
SOCIAL MEDIA INTERACTIONS AND THE EXPRESSION OF EXTREMIST BELIEFS. CASE STUDY: CYBERBULLYING IN THE ROMANIAN VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT

Summary/Abstract: Harassment is characterized by intentionality, repetitiveness and the existence of an imbalance in the aggressor-victim power balance. With regard to online harassment, known as cyberbullying, there is currently no unanimously accepted definition and no academic agreement on how the three components of the definition of offline harassment might overlap with online harassment. The latest study by Bitdefender company shows that in 2017, four out of five Romanian teenagers said they were bullied online, most often aggressions being focused on the way the targets shows or dresses, and on the second place is the passions of free time, followed by the financial level of the family of origin, school results and sexual preferences. So far, concrete cases of cyberbullying with targets or authors among Romanian citizens have been extremely limited in quantity, a possible explanation of the lack of visibility could be the absence of a tragic outcome or the retention of victims from telling their story. Another dimension of online aggression is based on racial or ethnic intolerance, exemplifying situations being those where anti-Semitic or anti-Muslim views have been catalysed by punctual events, sometimes without immediate significance, but which have been speculated for the liberation of negative narrations in the virtual environment, maybe expressions of dormant resentment of historical character.

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