Cyberbully via Social Media: An Antecedent Study of Prevalence and Determinant during Covid-19 Pandemic Lockdown in Malaysia

Abstract

With the advanced skills in the technology field, cyberbullying has replaced the conventional bullying. It has become a trend especially on social media platforms. Cyberbully is not just ganging up with others by scolding a person on social media, but it can involve stalking others' profile which is a repeated action taken via social media to gather the user's private information and directly communicate with the victim by sending threatening and cursing messages. Furthermore, cyberbully also involves harassment which is a behavior that the perpetrator has been interrupting, threatening, annoying without the consent of the victim. The impact of being cyberbullied will be disastrous. However, there are very few articles that research the factors of cyberbullying as most of the journal articles focus on how to solve the problem that cyberbullying has become a common phenomenon. The aim of this paper is to investigate the factors that cause high prevalence rate of cyberbullying on social media. With the utilization of quantitative method by conducting closed-ended surveys, a total of 306 Malaysian respondents were collected among individuals with aged from below 12 to above 44 who had experience in cyberbullying. The collected data was analyzed via structural equation modeling to validate the impact of the degree of Technology Use, Boredom, Depression and Concealed Identity on causing high prevalence rate of cyberbullying on social media. The major findings of this research showed that, only Technology Use and Depression are significantly related to the happening of cyberbullying. Insignificant impacts were found on Boredom and Concealed Identity to cyberbullying. This paper will be valuable to all educators, parents, non-government associations to be aware of the phenomenon of cyberbullying in the entire virtual world. Further improvements and recommendation are discussed in this research paper as well.