I don't get it. Anything a bully can do to you over social media, they can also do to you without using the internet at all. Anything they needed to be near you to do, they still need to be near you to do.
the reason I said assume there is because I went to school before social media - but my biggest bully was my dad, so it was impossible to completely escape the bullying. in fact I loved going to school, because those bullies I could handle. I gave them as much grief as I took. but the one at home I was stuck with, because he controlled all my movements and time with people outside school hours.
I expect cyberbullying isn't very different, traumatically speaking.
At least for me, the physical aspects of bullying never mattered much. As you say, you can simply punch back. What mattered to me was the excluding otherness I felt never getting to be part of the collective. I still struggle with that.
Ironically, social media sort of helped me there. Forums led me to people who would accept me. I played games with people, I could chat with them, they were willing to accept me.
I meant it in the sense of "relating to or in the form of words", so we're in agreement!
Right now there is instant, 24 hour access between kids, tools for altering video and photos and an audience large as you can imagine.
I am very glad I grew up before social media.
Just a single obvious example: What tools did they have to broadcast photoshopped images of you to all of your peers?
If you're thinking "what tools did they have to create photoshopped images of you with?", why would you attribute that to social media?
You just did a lot of oil paintings. And prior to that you did some cave drawings?
The irony would be hilarious, if it wasn't just straight up mean.
Let me give you an analogy:
An apple takes 1 year to fall from a tree.
An apple takes 1 seconds to fall from a tree.
An apple falls from a tree.
No difference.
To physically bully you before with a compromising (but fake) photo, the bully would need to physically distribute said images to the presence of your friends and family, which requires time, knowledge of their location, etc. Not so now; if you used a social network and they could see connections to other users (such as family members) then they can just follow those connections by messaging those people directly.
That difference in scale and ease for the bully is real vis-a-vis physically vs social media.
And normal people on the internet was told to never ever reveal their name or address to others online for fear bad people would misuse that info.
If anything, social media would give that kid more opportunities to find a group that will accept them.
It's not a world of difference, but it might explain why it's not as stark as you might expect at worst.
Even just as text, you can get dog-piled: we evolved to be social creatures, and for groups of 150-200; for most of us, if we're called names by that many people in quick succession, it breaks us. That's a small online mob, as these things go.
But bullies these days also have effectively zero marginal cost cameras, so they can take as much video as it takes waiting for you to mess up, then do a Cardinal Richelieu — "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
In my day, you could take up to about 24 pictures quickly before needing to take the film out and put new film in, and that would take a while to develop and actually cost money, so that just didn't happen (that I've heard of).
But it's not just taking photos of things that actually happened and misrepresenting them, even one picture is enough to put your classmates into AI generated porn… which is, as you may expect, a thing that kids these days are getting into trouble for doing. In my day, such image manipulation was manual and expensive* and therefore reserved for celebrities, though I doubt that's any real relief to Sarah Michelle Gellar in one example I remember, nor to GWB and (today the relatives of) bin Laden in the other.
* we had a single copy of Photoshop… donated to the art department, which had only one (old) Mac on which to run it. Hard to pirate that kind of software back then even if you knew how to use it, definitely couldn't get unsupervised access to that machine.
But it's not just still images these days, a brief audio recording of your voice and that can also be synthesised. Dictaphones were just starting to get affordable in my last year of mandatory education, and we pranked a teacher by mixing their last lesson with new age relaxation music, burning a CD of that, printed a cover saying something about curing insomnia, and giving it to them as a "last day gift". Now everyone has a dictaphone in their pocket, now you can synthesise anyone's voice saying anything, make images of them appearing to do anything. And a world where those things are, for now, still often treated as if they were real.
But even just text, the internet made it a different world than when I was at school. The psychological impact of being told you, personally, are Officially Bad, that's something that sticks with us and hurts us even when it comes from a pattern of illuminated pixels on their Mandatory Rectangular Communication Prism caused by someone on the other side of the planet who had no business talking to us in the first place; and that distant person can be incited to form part of a mob by a pattern of illuminated pixels on their Mandatory Rectangular Communication Prism.
Same with recording silly videos or taking photos of themselves to share with friends. When the relationship turns sour, that is raw material to humiliate the other.
Simple; the one kid tells everyone what the other kid said.
Memories are biased such that we mostly don't remember the bad things our friends have said, we mainly remember the good. And the inverse for our enemies.
When you change from one to the other, what didn't pass into long term memory can't just come back.
But honestly, I can see you are fully committed to the premise that “things are exactly the same now as before” and so this discussion is pointless.
Instantly spread a rumour to dozens or hundreds of kids?
Taunting you even when you're at home?
etc etc
This might be a European take, but we used to actually visit each other. When I was a kid, you'd only rarely hang out at home. You'd mostly be out with the other kids at a playground, someone's house, or downtown.
Keeping people out of those "shared but private" spaces was part of the bullying. In that sense, a shared Facebook groupchat isn't any different.