Do They Truly Intend to Harm Their Friends?: The Motives Beyond Cyberbullying among University Students

This present study probes and reveals the student's motives in their online interactive communication which can be considered as a cyberbullying act. The data is collected from 157 blog archives and interview sessions with 12 selected students. These students were selected purposively from Universitas Lancang Kuning, Indonesia, due to their high frequency of producing comments in their blogs which are cyberbullying in nature. From a total of 6,259 comments, this study focused on 255 that indicates online aggression. Data analysis reveals in detail three most common motives of cyberbullying among university students in their online interactive communication, i.e., just for fun (79%), to fight back (9%), and to express upsetting feelings (5%). Thus, this study's findings are different from past and present studies about cyberbullying, which sees cyberbullying fully as a threat as a common point. Instead of seeing cyberbullying as only a danger, this study clearly sees in some parts that cyberbullying can simply be an act of playing or exaggerating with language.

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