Digital Bullying as a Cyber-Symbolic Threat: Rethinking Cybersecurity in Tourism and Hospitality

Digital transformation has reconfigured the competitive landscape of tourism, expanded opportunities, and intensified exposure to digitally mediated harms. Online platforms have become crucial arenas in which reputation, legitimacy, and visibility are produced, circulated, and contested. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic power, this research conceptualizes digital bullying as a set of targeted, repeated, or coordinated practices intended to intimidate, delegitimize, or damage tourism actors. We examine organized reputational attacks, influencer-led mobilizations, and algorithmically amplified review manipulation as forms of cyber-symbolic aggression that erode symbolic capital, weaken credibility, and destabilize competitive position. However, we do not equate these practices with conventional technical cyber incidents; rather, we argue that they are cybersecurity-relevant because they exploit digital infrastructures and platformized visibility regimes to amplify vulnerability and reduce organizational control. A key practical implication is that tourism and hospitality organizations should integrate reputational threat monitoring into their cybersecurity and governance strategies.