Around the country, more and more of our young people are falling victim to cyber bullying – the use of electronic devices such as an Internet-connected computers to bully, harass, intimidate or humiliate another individual. But where is all of this online cyber bullying taking place? The following list provides insight into the sites most commonly being used for cyber bullying as well as why and how this problem is occurring.

MySpace Cyber Bullying

MySpace is the number one social networking site for high school age students and younger. How popular is MySpace? Rupert Murdoch bought the company $580 millions dollars just a few short years ago and now the company’s value is several times that already huge figure.

Most kids use MySpace to set up profiles and share information about themselves, their favorite music, Hollywood stars and other interests with kids in their school or neighborhood. For most, MySpace represents a fun form of self-expression that utilizes the latest online technology.

But a small percentage of kids use MySpace for cyber bullying. This can be accomplished in several different ways, including:

• Posting hateful information on another person’s MySpace page.
• Posting hateful information about another person on your own MySpace page
• Creating a new MySpace profile for the sole purpose of bullying another individual.

However it is executed, cyber bullying on MySpace remains a significant problem. While many chalk it up to “kids being kids”, more and more are starting to realize that a nasty post on someone’s MySpace page is as bad or worse that a taunt yelled across the schoolyard.

Facebook Cyber Bullying

Facebook is similar to MySpace except that it is geared towards a slightly older audience (the music and customization functionality is a lot less robust than found on MySpace) but is still being used by cyber bullies to harass their classmates and ex-friends. The rules of engagement are similar to those found in MySpace: people will either use their own profile to harass others, or create fake identities and build profiles to harass other people or dupe them into thinking another person is interested in them (romantically or as a friend).

Twitter Cyber Bullying

One of the fastest growing social media enterprises, Twitter allows people to “follow” one another by posting regular updates about their activities. Twitter is seeing a growing number of cyber bullying incidents as more and more kids figure out how to post hateful, harassing information about their friends and deliver it “via Tweet” to as many followers of the site as they can.

Website Cyber Bullying

In the most extreme cases of cyber bullying, many kids are going to the trouble of building entire websites from scratch in order to use them to humiliate another individual. A common method for doing this is to buy a URL from godaddy.com that humiliates the target (such as www.lisaisugly.com) then fill it with unkind postings and photos (Photoshopping a person into uncompromising positions is a highly used form of cyber bullying) then spreading word about the site to others via email, social networking, etc.