Cyberbullying validation

Cyberbullying is widely recognised as a serious social menace which affects millions of people around the world, especially teenagers and adolescents. In this Chapter, we present the results of an online survey, which is conducted to understand and differentiate between real cyberbullying and cyberbullying-like instances in user generated content. We study the subtle differences between the motives of the sender of messages similar to cyberbullying, and how messages are perceived by the recipient. In particular, we investigate forms, prevalence, and key indicators of cyberbullying within written contents. Firstly three variants of cyberbullying are introduced, namely: 'direct', 'indirect'and 'misinterpreted'forms of cyberbullying, based on the involvement of the recipient in these types of cyberbullying. Then we validate the key indicators which make written contents becomes cyberbullying, based on users'online experiences and the frequency with which they received and/or sent cyberbullying messages