> Bullying is not new and was performed via sms before the internet.

Pretty sure the internet was a thing well before kids got dumb phones.

> Pretty sure the internet was a thing well before kids got dumb phones.

The internet has evolved meaningfully over the last 10 years, even. Evolved might be generous, though.

Yeah, myspace was already dead and buried 10 years ago and we’d all stopped using msn/aim and moved to other platforms by that point

That is true. The ubiquitous mobile internet and social media I should have said.

I remember when a bully would have to go up to you themselves to mete out whatever harassment, and you could avoid a lot of it by just being aware and avoiding that particular person.

Juxtapose that with today, where any one bully can create dozens of accounts to bully in a swarm, and the bully has constant access to you from your own pocket. Also, a person in Minsk or Timbuktu or whatever couldn't just come up to your house in the middle of the night to harass you out of boredom.

This "we could do X before computers, why are we trying to ban X-with-computers now?" line of arguments is just intellectually lazy. If a bad behavior was well moderated in the past because it was labor or resource intensive, the sudden removal of those constraints is a material change that demands revisiting. Put another way, if a constraint stops working, we should change constraints, not just do the old constraint with a confused expression on our faces.

You can do all of this with SMS.

Kids know how to download or use free texting apps and sites, giving them access to potentially thousands of different numbers from which they can engage in harassment campaigns. In fact, it's an incredibly common tactic.

Similarly, someone from Minsk and Timbuktu can do the same thing, they have access to the same tools.

My point was not "oh, social media bullying is some kind of special case compared to other ways kids today bully their peers". My point was "modern bullying is different from historic bullying, and dismissing modern bullying as the same as historic bullying is intellectually lazy"

> Bullying is not new and was performed via sms before the internet

I seem to remember real bullies would do it to your face before the internet. Not just anyone behind a keyboard.

Funny enough, adults are also prone to bullying in large groups online. This does not go away later in life.

That is true and we have certainly seen our fair share of that.

Adults are however also better equipped to deal with that, especially if they have not been subjected to such abuse as children. It is worth noting that online bullying is however not the most serious matter here, rather (in my mind at least) it is the systematic targeting of kids/teenagers to get inside their head and get them to perform violent acts against themselves or others around them.