Identifying Differentiating Factors for Cyberbullying in Vine and Instagram

A multitude of online social networks (OSNs) of varying types has been introduced in the past decade. Because of their enormous popularity and constant availability, the threat of cyberbullying launched via these OSNs has reached an unprecedented level. Victims of cyberbullying are now more vulnerable than ever before to the predators, perpetrators, and stalkers. In this work, we perform a detailed analysis of user postings on Vine and Instagram social networks by making use of two labeled datasets. These postings include threads of media posts and user comments that were labeled for being cyberbullying instances or not. Our analysis has revealed several important differentiating factors between cyberbullying and non-cyberbullying instances in these social networks. In particular, cyberbullying and non-cyberbullying instances differ in (i) the number of unique negative commenters, (ii) temporal distribution of positive and negative sentiment comments, and (iii) textual content of media captions and subsequent comments. The results of these analyses can be used to build highly accurate classifiers for identifying cyberbullying instances.