Social Media Facilitating Teens' Performances in Visual Bullying

Abstract

This study explores how social media facilitates visual bullying among Chinese teenagers, focusing on its manifestations, impacts, and preventive strategies. In-depth interviews with high school students—active users of multiple social media accounts who had experienced or witnessed visual bullying—were analyzed using thematic analysis on social facilitation and visual-metaphor bullying. Findings indicate that the features of networking, information exchange, and anonymity constitute the technical architecture and algorithmic logic of social media enabling performative bullying. Such practices manifest in three primary forms: defamatory, humorous, and stereotype-coding, often expressed through memes, group chats, hashtags, and anonymous accounts. Although frequently rationalized as “joking”, these behaviors reveal adolescents’ recognition of bullying and its adverse effects. Impacts include emotional scars, amplification through algorithmic spread, persistent harm from digital footprints, and symbolic attacks underestimated in severity. A critical gap of ‘awareness-leading-but-ability-lagging’ characterizes teens’ cyberbullying literacy, underscoring the need for interventions that move from operational competence to proactive critical curation, from abstract awareness to applied empathetic action, and from personal risk management to collective responsibility. The study concludes by emphasizing the importance of enhancing social media literacy to cultivate a safer digital environment both for and by teenagers in mitigating visual bullying.