Cyberbullies in Twitter: A focused review Nicolas Tsapatsoulis ∗ and Vasiliki Anastasopoulou † ∗ Dept. of Communication and Internet Studies, Cyprus University of Technology, Cyprus Email: nicolas.tsapatsoulis@cut.ac.cy † Dept. of Psychology, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece Abstract—This literature review focuses on recent techniques and studies regarding cyberbullying on Twitter. The purpose of these studies is to find smart and sophisticated ways and methods to detect these cyberbullying incidents and in case that it is not possible to fully eliminate them to provide the means to vastly reduce them. We present the theoretical roots of the term cyberbullying and we discuss thoroughly some influential studies to motivate new researchers that work in the general area of cybersecurity and privacy. Index Terms—cyberbullying, Twitter, online media, hashtags, cybersecurity, privacy I. I NTRODUCTION Bullying existed before the onset of the term ‘cyber’. Cyber- bullying and cyber aggression mirror the actions of bullying and aggression accordingly through the Internet. Aggression in bottom line is the oral statement or action to hurt someone just once while cyber-aggression is the use of electronic means towards a person or a group who perceive such behaviour as offensive, derogatory, harmful or unwanted. By extension cyberbullying is the intentional aggressive behaviour repeated over and over involving an imbalance of power. Basically, bullying is about dominating and our ancestors were big into dominance hierarchy. According to Boehm [1] “any species that has a social dominant hierarchy, like apes or monkeys or wild dogs or lions, has bullies”. Additionally, he states that bullying is adaptive for many species, to anyone in any way “because you get better food or mating opportunities In primates, studies have shown that the top bullies have more offspring and therefore their genes proliferate”. Thus, it seems that there is a payoff to it, the more you bully, the higher you will rise in social ranks. Although this seems to be something that was happening eons ago, the anonymity of the Internet and the ability to create plethora of fake accounts on the contemporary social media, boosted a new form of bullying, known as cyberbullying, to expand the last decade. A typical profile of a cyberbully refers to a person that might pass threats of violence, involved in sexual harassment, stalking or hate crimes or posting online sexually-explicit photos or messages [2]. Cyberbullying explode as a side effect of the widest use of the Internet by everyday people. Anonymous users began to take their roles in the stage by expressing themselves without taking into account the consequences to the other users on the Internet, based on the “safety” that the victims will never come to them. One of the earliest incidents of cyberbullying was recorded when a middle school boy in 1998 threatened his algebra teacher and the school principal, through a website which he created on his own 1 . Megan Meier, an American teenager, committed suicide by hanging herself and her suicide was attributed to cyberbullying through the social networking website MySpace. The mother of a friend of Meier was indicated on the matter but she was eventually acquitted. The increasing frequency of cyberbullying incidents caused some actions of prevention and repercussions such as the anti- bullying statute and laws for schools to have strict policies for cyberbullying. Software tools for parents that support their role to prevent cyberbullying by monitoring electronic devices and Internet usage were also developed. However, cyberbullying is not an issue involving only teenagers, either as bullies or victims, it is much more involving people in every age and class. While the anti-bullying measures taken to protect minors are vey welcome and critical they caused, at the same time, a disorientation of the problem and underestimation of the dangers of cyberbullying on the rest of the human society. II. BACKGROUND According to several researchers, the scourge of cyberbul- lying was started with #GamerGate 2 ; a campaign that was organised to harass in online platforms. This hashtag was placed on a tweet by Adam Baldwin when he saw a couple of videos without any intention “of creating a hashtag of movement or anything like that”, as he declared in an interview with Every Joe 3 . An ex-boyfriend got upset with his girlfriend, Zoe Quinn who is a game developer of “Depression Quest”, and he wrote a disparaging post in a blog. The users of this hashtag accused Quinn falsely for unethical relationship with the journalist Nathan Grayson, causing Quinn and her family to be exposed to a virulent and often misogynistic harassment campaign. The people behind this campaign initially referred to as “quinnspiracy, but adopted the Twitter hashtag “Gamer- gate”. Supporters of Gamergate targeted in August 2014 women in the video game industry. They were organised on online platforms like 4chan 4 , Twitter, Reddit 5 and Internet Relay Chat 6 anonymously or using pseudonymous. Even though this 1 http://howtoadult.com/history-cyberbullying-6643612.html 2 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate controversy 3 http://www.everyjoe.com/2014/10/06/news/ interview-adam-baldwin-gamergate-politics-ranger/ 4 http://www.4chan.org/ 5 https://www.reddit.com/ 6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet Relay Chat 978-1-7281-3634-9/19/$31.00 c 2019 IEEE