Harassment Beyond Borders: Sexting, Cyber Bullying and Cyber Stalking in Social Media. Can Sri Lanka Protect Victims?

Abstract

Even though Research and practice have mostly focused on the “bright side” of social media, aiming to understand and help in leveraging the manifold opportunities afforded by this technology, it is increasingly observable that social media present enormous risks for individuals, communities, firms, and even the whole of society as per the above statement. Examples for this “dark side” of social media include cyber bullying, Cyber stalking, addictive use, trolling, online witch hunts, fake news, and privacy abuse. In this article, I aim to illustrate the multidimensionality of the dark side of social media and describe the related various undesirable outcomes. To do this, we adapt the established social media honeycomb framework to explain the dark side implications of each of the seven functional building blocks: conversations, sharing, presence, relationships, reputation, groups, and identity. On the basis of these reflections, we present a number of avenues for future research, so as to facilitate a better understanding and use of social media.