AN ANALYSIS OF FICTIONAL NARRATIVES ON CYBERBULLYING IN THE ERA OF SOCIAL MEDIA

As the social media platforms and search engines entered our lives with the WEB 2.0 era, two-way communication has truly come to life. Unfortunately, this transformation in communication has caused some negative social effects. Traditional bullying, which means repetitive behaviors aiming to harm individuals or groups, has begun to occur in online environments, thus the concept of cyberbullying has emerged. Cyberbullying has also begun to be included as a theme in fictional narratives in recent years. This research aims to study 50 cyberbullying-themed movies and TV series released between 2010 and 2025, in terms of the crime definitions and victim / offender portrayal by using the descriptive analysis method. According to the data obtained, it was seen that the victims were mostly presented as women. In the depiction of the offenders, the density of male characters is striking. Although adolescents are mostly presented as victims, it is seen that in narratives with a small number of adolescent offenders, the victim is also an adolescent. While the ratio of adolescents to adults among the victims is close to each other, the ratio of adults to adolescents among the offenders is considerably higher. It was seen that the most frequently mentioned crimes were invasion of privacy, blackmail, manipulation with a fake account, cyberstalking, distribution of explicit content and identity theft. Finally, it is possible to say that focusing on cyberbullying as a theme in fictional narratives is significant in terms of drawing attention to the destructive effects of the problem.