Just when I thought I’d heard everything, along comes a brand new victimhood phenomenon called self-cyberbullying. Apparently, it’s “a thing” now.
Here’s how it works: Kids (and it seems to be mostly kids) create bogus Facebook profiles and other online personae just so that they can douse their real social media accounts with vitriol. According to Sameer Hinduja, co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Center, about 6% of teens aged 12 to 17 have engaged in self-cyberbullying. This figure should be treated as a minimum because the data were gathered through self-reports. In other words, 6% of the aforementioned group admitted to self-cyberbullying. The actual number is almost certainly higher.
It occurs to me that I had in fact heard of self-cyberbullying several years before the release of this study, I just hadn’t known that the phenomenon has a name. In 2013, a University of Wyoming student, Meg Lanker-Simons, whipped
