Exploring bystander contagion in cyberbully detection: a systematic review

Abstract

Since the advent of mass access to the Internet, aggressive behaviors such as cyberbullying have become widespread on social networking sites. An aggressive online environment can lead to negative attitudes that negatively impact the victim, bystanders, and the bullies themselves. One of the main reasons for the increase in this type of behavior is contagion from bystanders—a phenomenon that needs to be stopped. In recent years, many studies have looked at cyberbullying detection, considering various factors to improve detection, such as extracting different types of features, comparing the performance of different classifiers, and processing datasets in myriad ways. It is evident from our findings that previous works in the literature fell short of detecting cyberbullying by ignoring the characteristics of bystanders and their roles. Thus, this paper aims to present a systematic literature review of research conducted over the past 10 years to determine which methods encompassed features related to bystanders and their role and analyzed the contagion and causal factors of the spread of cyberbullying. There are different studies confirmed the existence of bystander contagion, which researchers rarely consider to detect cyberbullying. This gap could be exploited in future studies and used to improve the detection of cyberbullying. Therefore, in this paper, the summary and comparison of findings from the selected studies that examined the role of bystanders in cyberbullying are presented, concluding how bystander-related features could contribute to the detection of cyberbullying.