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Gen Z is crowdsourcing bullying and it’s only going to get worse
A young girl in a TikTok video, perhaps fifteen or sixteen, sits on her bed in a schoolgirl outfit inspired by Japanese high schools. “What do you want me to say?” She says coyly, voice artificially pitched up. “Good morning? Hello?” The video cuts to the similarly aged girl who stitched the video, adding her own video to the end of the original. “I’m going to fucking kill myself,” she says. The comments take this as their cue, gleefully ripping into the original poster. The likes on this video dwarf the original.
In a world where people lovingly extol the virtues of mental health, kindness, and comedically “punching up,” social media is facilitating teens’ abilities to bully others en masse. Far from the cyberbullying in the primeval days of social media, where a friend group or social circle would use their social media as a chance to excoriate a fringe member of their social circle, with the advent of mass social media that is easily discovered and fewed by hundreds of thousands, bullying has reached hive mind levels.
Teen girls post videos of their dates mocking their hair, clothes, or mannerisms. Teen boys post videos of girls they see in public, rating their bodies, mocking their actions, or asking for their followers to doxx the girl so they can find them.
