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Cyberbullying is an increasingly prevalent phenomenon impacting young adults. In this paper, we present a study on both detecting cyberbullies in online social networks and identifying the pairwise interactions between users through which the influence of bullies seems to spread. In particular, we investigate the role of user demographics and social network features in predicting how users will respond to a cyberbullying comment. We characterize the influencer/influenced relationship by which a user who has no history of abuse observes a peer engaging in bullying and follows suit. To our knowledge, this is the first effort modeling peer pressure and social dynamics with analytical models. We validate our models on two distinct social network datasets, totalling over 16,000 posts. Our results offer insight into the dynamics of bullying and confirm social theories on the power of peer groups in the cyberworld. A full version of this paper is available on arXiv.org.
Squicciarini et al. (Tue,) studied this question.