Social Media Influencer and Cyberbullying: A Lesson Learned from Preliminary Findings

Social media influencers generate large followers that include the enthusiastic engaged people who value their views, as well as haters. While enjoying the opportunities to become the endorser of certain brands as a result of being famous, they are also bound by cyberbullying issues. Cyberbullying is not new, it has happened even before the social networking era. Nonetheless, the focus of cyberbullying related studies is usually school children or young adults. This study fills the gap by exploring the categories of cyberbullying faced by the social media influencers and the best practices to deal with the problem. We collected the data by using content analysis and interview techniques. The findings show that social media influencers face (i) harassment, (ii) flaming, (iii) outing, (iv) masquerading, (v) dissing, (vi) trolling and (vii) catfishing as part of the cyberbullying by their haters. We also found that the influencers' best practices to handle the situation differs based on the form of cyberbullying. The findings contribute to the existing literature on cyberbullying studies, particularly the lesson learned from the cyberbullying towards social media influencers.