Hidden in plain sight

The power and pain of words amid the rise of cyberbullying

Story by Madelyn Jones

Illustration by Royce Alton

Published April 7, 2026

It’s midnight. In a darkened bedroom, a phone buzzes, signaling a new message. The glow from the phone screen lights up someone’s blotchy, tear-stained cheeks, the sheets pulled up over their head. Their hands shake, and their breath catches in a hiccup as another cruel message stretches across the illuminated screen. 

They could be a 21-year-old college student who’s finishing up their major application, hoping to get into a small and competitive program. Or a 17-year-old who just got their driver’s license and is busy planning a cross-country road trip for the summer after graduation. Or a 9-year-old who has dreamed of becoming a veterinarian ever since their family adopted a senior dog last year. 

It can happen to anyone. Your best friend, your next-door neighbor, your boss. The smartphones we all carry with us — our lifelines, for many of us — can become a weapon others can use to do us harm. And since we almost always have our phones, there’s no telling whether this violence will find us at our worst or our best moments. 

Shaheen Shariff is a Distinguished James McGill Professor Emerita at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. Over the past 20 years, she’s researched cyberbullying and has seen how widespread it's become.

“The problem is that a lot of this, what I now call online harm and technology facilitated violence, is (it’s) impacting all ages of people, not just young people, not just kids,” Shariff said. “Youth, adults, even seniors, politicians, people with disabilities, immigrants — anyone that can become a target.” 

In the early 2010s, Shariff received a grant to research cyberbullying. At the time, there had been a few cyberbullying-related suicides in Canada that were linked to online sexual violence. Thus, the research project Define the Line was born, with Shariff as director. Define the Line researches online harm to develop solutions and raise awareness of digital safety.

“A lot of my work has looked at the law and ‘where is that line between where it’s just free expression and where it crosses over to bullying and harassment?’” Shariff said. 

Russ Robinson, director of school safety and security for Bellingham Public Schools, said social media can be used positively, but it also gives people access to harm those they may not know well and negatively impact their lives. “(It) can be totally detrimental to the student’s mental health and well-being and ability to be a fun kid,” Robinson said. 

In an effort to protect their students, BPS has resources for parents and families and recently hosted a talk on healthy technology use. Students also sign an acceptable use agreement, part of which prohibits them from using school technology and networks to harm someone else online. 

Bill Palmer, BPS’s director of educational technology, said that staff participate in annual anti-cyberbullying training so they can effectively observe the signs and know how to stop and appropriately report the behavior. 

Cyberbullying continues to affect young people more so than ever. The rise of social media has given children and adolescents easier access to online spaces, which are often unregulated. This opens them up to being targets of online harm. The growth of AI is another emerging concern.

“We’re finding more and more cases of AI convincing some young people to develop eating disorders and making them depressed and taking them to the brink of suicide,” Shariff said. 

AI isn’t the only factor to blame here. Shariff argues that social media sites aren’t doing enough to prevent online harm from taking place in their cyberspaces. 

“The online platforms are almost designing their platforms to allow offensive online communications, because it just brings more and more people to their sites and they make more money from it,” Shariff said. 

For many young people, the pull to social media is more about belonging than anything else. As part of her work for Define the Line, Shariff and her colleagues at McGill conducted a survey with seventh graders about the distribution of intimate images and asked whether they engaged in the behavior and why. The students who said they’d participated in the distribution said it was in an effort to fit in with their peers. 

“The other aspect is that 68% of them said that even if it was illegal, they would still do it because it helped to make their friends laugh,” Shariff said. 

It can be incredibly difficult to avoid negative content online. The digital environment often makes people feel emboldened to fire off malicious comments, shielded behind the perceived safety of a screen. 

There’s a reason those digital words linger.

“Our brains are hardwired to pay attention to negative content, or things that activate our stress response … way more intensely than the positive stuff,” said CJ Swanlund, licensed psychologist and director of the Counseling and Wellness Center at Western Washington University.

That hardwired response, while useful in moments of physical danger, doesn’t distinguish well between a real-world threat and a hostile comment glowing from a screen. When we’re consistently exposed to that kind of stimuli, it can impact many areas of our lives, including eating and sleeping habits, mood and our general sense of safety. 

“Something really interesting that happens, too, when our stress response is activated is that our thinking ability gets really narrow, and so we’re not really able to take in a lot of perspectives,” Swanlund said. 

In that state, we’re more likely to take comments at face value, and these negative sentiments feel like facts. Only when we return to our emotional baseline can we see the bigger picture. But in the heat of a scrolling spiral, that baseline can feel a million miles away. 

Participants in a 2025 academic study who received negative comments on a simulated social media post reported higher anxiety and lower mood than those who received neutral or positive feedback, according to a report published in Scientific Reports.

The study found that young adults were more likely to experience these mood shifts because they’re often still developing their sense of self and social roles, leading them to place significant importance on their online persona. This can make them more susceptible to experiencing negative emotions in response to criticism or competition. 

“Depending on how we’re feeling about ourselves and what messages we’re being exposed to, it can really (make us) question our self-worth and start to make us feel isolated,” Swanlund said.

Swanlund said a first step when someone is struggling with cyberbullying is to recognize the onset of a negative mindset. It’s important to find strategies to bring yourself back down to your emotional baseline. This could look like spending time engaged in a favorite hobby or taking a break from social media. 

Isolation is the silent danger of cyberbullying. Swanlund urged the importance of paying attention to your loved ones and reaching out if you notice a change in their normal behavior. 

“There is nothing more powerful than giving the gift of connection,” Swanlund said. “It’s scary, sometimes, to go out of your way to offer connection to someone else, but we are yearning for connection.” 

For those facing cyberbullying, support is available. The Crisis Text Line offers free, confidential assistance from trained mental health professionals. Text CONNECT to 741741 to be connected with a counselor.