Knowledge Management International Conference (KMICe) 2018, 25 –27 July 2018, Miri Sarawak, Malaysia http://www.kmice.cms.net.my/ 200 Social Media Influencer and Cyberbullying: A Lesson Learned from Preliminary Findings Syahida Hassan 1 , Mohd Idzwan Yacob 1 , Thuan Nguyen 2 and Suzana Zambri 3 1 Universiti Utara Malaysia, Malaysia, {syahida@uum.edu.my, idzwan@uum.edu.my} 2 Can Tho University of Technology, Vietnam, {nhthuan@ctuet.edu.vn} 3 Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia, {suzanaz@tmsk.uitm.edu.my} ABSTRACT Social media influencers generate large followers that include the enthusiastic engaged people who value their views, as well as haters. While enjoying the opportunities to become the endorser of certain brands as a result of being famous, they are also bound by cyberbullying issues. Cyberbullying is not new, it has happened even before the social networking era. Nonetheless, the focus of cyberbullying related studies is usually school children or young adults. This study fills the gap by exploring the categories of cyberbullying faced by the social media influencers and the best practices to deal with the problem. We collected the data by using content analysis and interview techniques. The findings show that social media influencers face (i) harassment, (ii) flaming, (iii) outing, (iv) masquerading, (v) dissing, (vi) trolling and (vii) catfishing as part of the cyberbullying by their haters. We also found that the influencers’ best practices to handle the situation differs based on the form of cyberbullying. The findings contribute to the existing literature on cyberbullying studies, particularly the lesson learned from the cyberbullying towards social media influencers. Keywords: Social media influencer, cyberbullying, social networking. I INTRODUCTION Social media influencers are users of social media who have built a reputation for their knowledge and expertise on a particular topic or those who have established their credibility in a specific industry. They make regular posts about the topic on their preferred social media channels, which generate large followings of enthusiastic engaged people. These followers pay close attention to the influencers’ views. According to Otu (2015) trolling on the social media happens when social media users make controversial and abusive content to misinform, divert attention, as well as mock and bully the publisher of a post. Trolling may come from a range of reasons, such as disagreement, jealousy, or just for the sake of driving a particular conversation towards a particular direction. In many cases, the act of trolling allows the room for cyberbullying. This is because, among social media users, there are some who do not realize the impact and the significance of either their comments or actions on social media (Millet, 2014). Recently, there are many studies focusing on cyberbullying due to the seriousness of this issue. They study different aspects of the issue, including role of parental and norms (Sasson & Mesch, 2017), social media of cyberbullying (Sterner & Felmlee, 2017; Görzig & Frumkin, 2013), empathy (Zych et al, 2018), prevention and resilience (Hinduja & Patchin, 2017), mental health (Kim et al., 2018), prediction (Chen et al., 2017), cross cultural (Smith & Robinson; Shapka et al., 2018), prevention (Espelage & Hong, 2017), higher education students (Heiman & Olenik, 2015), bystander behavior (Olenik-Shemesh et al., 2017; Patterson et al., 2017), and socio-emotional (Heiman et al., 2015). These large number of studies testifies the seriousness and importance of the research issue. Looking at past studies, a few important gaps have been found. Firstly, although scholars concur that cyberbullying prevention and intervention are necessary, there is lack of research focusing on how to prevent or address cyberbullying. According to Espelage and Hong (2017), Cassidy et al. (2013) and Pearce et al. (2011), one common strategy to prevent cyberbullying is to provide information on what constitutes cyberbullying and to avoid being a victim. Yet, the current study believes that there are other strategies to handle cyberbully that we are not aware of. Therefore, identifying the best practices for handling cyberbully is a must. Secondly, much of the cyberbullying research are focusing on teenagers and young adults. We argue that it is necessary for researchers to include various range of ages because focusing solely on teenagers may lead researchers to miss some important findings related to different age groups. Victims from different age groups may experience very different issues related to cyberbullying. Thirdly, much less is known about the cyberbullying on social media influencers. It is important to investigate this field as the influencer marketing industry is a big industry. It is predicted to be A $5- $10 billion dollar market in the next 5 years (Evan, 2018). Identifying the best practices to handle cyberbullying, which is one of the issues that are likely to hinder its growth, is therefore vital. In addition, the best practices can help the authorities