Usually, social networking is used for connecting with old friends, scouting potential employees and sharing photos.

Pamela Orpinas, photo courtesy University of Georgia

In recent years, however, Facebook and its many sister-sites are not always used for good — harassment and hate groups appear more and more as social networking sites and blogs increase in popularity.

A study done by Nielsen Media Research in 2010 shows that the average person spends 421 minutes each month on Facebook alone. This number is more than the time spent on Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Microsoft, Wikipedia and Amazon — combined.

Despite the many positive aspects of social networking, however, negative aspects have begun to manifest as well.

Pamela Orpinas, professor of health promotion and behavior in the College of Public Health, has studied bullies for nearly two decades.

As social networking has become more and more popular, her studies made a shift to include “cyber bullying,” or bullying on the Internet.

She is the principal investigator of the Healthy Teens Longitudinal Study, a mix-method study designed to understand the social development that students follow from middle to high school. As part of the study, Orpinas followed students from sixth grade to twelfth grade to study their behavior.

In tenth grade, students reported involvement in cyber bullying by answering a series of survey questions. Orpinas asked the students questions such as: “In the past 30 days, has another student used the Internet, email, IM (instant messaging, chat), or text messaging to threaten, harass, or embarrass you by posting information/photos or sending messages about you?”

Through these surveys, Orpinas analyzed the prevalence of cyber bullying as well as typical trends in victimization.

Her studies show 15 percent of tenth grade respondents report involvement in cyber bullying perpetration or victimization during the 30 days prior to taking the survey. Of the students studied, 6 percent felt they had been bullying others in addition to being victimized by other bullies within the time period. Groups did not differ by gender, race or ethnicity.

“We found that students who reported cyber-bullying were more likely to report other forms of aggression,” Orpinas said. “The students who were both bullying and being bullied reported significantly more drug use and delinquent behaviors than all other students.”

Orpinas found that these students also reported significantly worse outcomes in life over time. More of them grew to experience depression, have deviant friends and develop worse relationships with their peers and family members.

Daryan Rahimzadeh, senior sociology major from Grayson, said he has experienced problems associated with social networking.

Daryan Rahimzadeh

He said he thinks there are several types of harassment and malicious intent may not be present every time someone feels victimized online. According to Rahimzadeh, what one person may find offensive, another may find amusing or trivial.

“It’s all fun and games if someone gets on my Facebook and posts something blatantly untrue,” said Rahimzadeh. “But when someone gets on and says something that sounds like it may or may not be true … I would get offended because I’m friends with a lot of people who are younger than me and they may not know. I wish people would be more careful with that, sometimes they just don’t know where to draw the line.”

This is exactly the point noted by Austin Laufersweiler, sophomore political science and communication studies major from Marietta.

“So far in my experience at UGA I believe I have seen some behavior that could be seen as cyber bullying,” Laufersweiler said. “But I don’t think the perpetrator would really understand that’s what it was every time. In the 140 characters on Twitter someone might say things about a friend or someone they met on the street [that] can be very hurtful. I think it is very different from what you would see in a high school where there is a blatant attack against someone via a MySpace. In college I think there is a lot less of that behavior. Its more passive remarks and things that could be potentially hurtful but neither party is sure of what is occurring.”

Laufersweiler is one of the outstanding students at the University who is fighting to eliminate bullying, whether it be on the internet or on the streets. He fought for a stricter definition of bullying which would specify the categories of the victims.

Austin Laufersweiler

In the Summer of 2010 Cobb County adopted Laufersweiler’s mission as their bullying policy for all Cobb county schools. Laufersweiler was later chosen to be part of a study about cyber bullying. In the study he was asked to share his experiences and how he feels about harassment that occurs online.

“It’s less confrontational to cyber bully someone over the internet, so its easier to do,” Laufersweiler said. He said it is not uncommon to act entirely different toward someone in person than over the internet, in a way that can be either helpful or hurtful depending on what is said.

Orpinas added social networking is not completely to blame for cyber bullying — someone must be sitting behind the computer screen in order to work these sites.

“People create those problems, but social networks are just a medium,” Orpinas said. “They can be a fantastic place to meet with people, to chat, to have a good interpersonal relationship. But people can also use them in a negative way. The medium is not the problem — the problem is how people use the medium.”