Cyberbullying: Physical appearance insults used by Malaysian social media users Shahidatul Maslina Mat Sood (*), Syakirah Shafien, Noor Syamimie Mohd Nawi, Lena A/P Ramamurthy, Nik Ahmad Farhan bin Azim @Nik Azim (b)
Fakulti Pengajian Bahasa dan Pembangunan Insan (FBI),
Universiti Malaysia Kelantan (UMK),
16310 Bachok,
Kelantan, Malaysia.
*maslina.ms[at]umk.edu.my
Abstract
Cyberbullying is a type of bullying which takes over digital devices and it has been typically identified with the presence of potentially profane or offensive words that can cause aggravation to others. This paper proposes a study on physical appearance insults used in cyberbullying among Malaysian social media users. Data collection is conducted in two phases. A self-constructed questionnaire is distributed to tertiary students of public university in Malaysia to elicit imperative keywords and phrases related to this type of bullying from different perspectives (perpetrator, victim and bystanders), while a streamed Twitter data provides a qualitative interpretation for this research. The analysis of the data is completed using a corpus-based approach where themes are gathered and categorised in contexts and clusters using SPSS Statistics 23 and AntConc software. Initial results indicate the linguistics realizations of physical appearance-related insults which use metaphors such as food imageries, a mixed code of Malay and English (code-mixing and intersentential code-switching), and there is also a presence of unusual keywords and phrases used to criticise someone^s physical appearance in Malaysian social media platforms.
Keywords: cyberbullying- online insults- social media- physical appearance- body shaming
