High school is known for being the best years in your life. You are young, you have barely any responsibilities and you still have so much to look forward to. High school, for some, are the best days and for some they can be the worst days of your life. For me, they were the best and also the worst. In my last year of high school, I was bullied and had barely any friends. During that time of my life I found that in a generation where social media is so important, it is easy for people to talk to each other without having to be near each other. With that being said it made me realize that the bullying didn’t stop after I left school, it followed me home because of the use of twitter and Facebook.
Bullying is not a new concept, it has been happening for years and years, as long as we can think. But the concept of how kids bully in today’s age is so different. In our parent’s generation, everything was face-to-face, they didn’t have social media or group chats. They didn’t have to fear what was being said about them on social media when they went home. In a twisted way of thinking, they had a break from the bullying.
Bullies are cowards, they always have been and always will be but now they can hide behind a computer screen. They can simply make a status or a tweet and when you accuse them of tweeting it about you they can simply deny it. You can take it into the school and say it was about you but sadly they’ll just tell you “how do you know?”. Even the bullies have lost touch in the world, kids that have always been kind can tweet something cruel and think its fine because they do not see the person that they are hurting. Social media has made bullying easy. Easy to do and easy to get away with.
In my senior year of high school, I learned that people will be mean to you in person and there are people that will do it online. It does not make one bully better than the other. At the end of the day they are both still bullies. They pick on the great and try to make them feel weak and they’ll take all their time to make sure they do so. We should learn to use social media for our benefits, it keeps us in touch with friends and keeps us up to date. We shouldn’t abuse it. Bullying might never stop even though we can hope it will. So it is our jobs, as the ones that are bullied, to stand above it. It does not show our lack of character it only shows theirs. We can stand up for each other and keep in mind that a simple tweet does not define us. So next time hit unfollow, unfriend or block if you ever see a bully on social media. We can stop cyberbullying. Together.
