Facebook accounts for half of all ‘extreme cyber-bullying’
Facebook has been named as the source of 54 per cent of all cases of ‘extreme cyber-bullying’, where vicious personal attacks are made on a daily basis, by children’s charity Ditch the Label.
In the largest ever report into online abuse it found that over one million young people face such abuse, damaging their self-esteem.
The figures were compiled in a report published which surveyed 10,000 13 to 22 year olds on their online experiences; with Facebook, Ask.fm and Twitter found to be the domains most favoured by bullies.
Ditch the Label founder Liam Hackett said: “I think there's a tendency for older people to think that cyberbullying is a lesser form of bullying because there is this idea you can delete a comment or you can block it and it's gone.
“But actually, we have seen that content becomes viral very quickly and when comments are put out on a public platform it can be more distressing for the victim because a lot of people are exposed to this content, so it's incredibly harmful.
“What we believe social networks should have to do is produce an annual external audit which would measure cyberbullying activity on a network, how many people are reporting cyberbullying and what happened as a result, and we believe that those reports should be made public.”