Towards Understanding Cyberbullying Behavior in a Semi-Anonymous Social Network

Abstract: Cyberbullying has emerged as an important and growing social problem, wherein people use online social networks and mobile phones to bully victims with offensive text, images, audio and video on a 247 basis. This paper studies negative user behavior in the Ask.fm social network, a popular new site that has led to many cases of cyberbullying, some leading to suicidal behavior.We examine the occurrence of negative words in Ask.fms question+answer profiles along with the social network of likes of questions+answers. We also examine properties of users with cutting behavior in this social network.