Most do not try to stop online bullies.

PositionCyberbystanding - Brief article

Some 221 college students participated in an online chat room in which they watched a fellow student get "bullied" right before their eyes. Only 10% of the students who noticed the abuse intervened directly, either by confronting the bully online or helping the victim. The abuse was not real--the bully and the victim were part of the experiment--but the participants did not know that.

"The results didn't surprise me," says Kelly Dillon, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in communications at Ohio State University, Columbus. "Many other studies have shown bystanders are reluctant to get involved when they see bullying. The results disappointed me as a human, but didn't surprise me as a scientist."

The bright spot in the results was that a much greater percentage of participants who noticed the bullying (nearly 70%) indirectly intervened by giving the bully or the chat room a bad review. "Most of the...

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