Cyberbullying Governance on Social Media: A Unified Framework from Content Identification to Intervention
For researchers and practitioners in online content moderation, this paper offers a comprehensive framework to guide future work, but it is a survey/position paper without empirical results.
This paper proposes a unified full-lifecycle governance framework for cyberbullying on social media, shifting from passive detection to proactive, continuous moderation across four stages: content identification, user modeling, diffusion dynamics, and intervention. It synthesizes existing literature and outlines challenges like multimodality and fairness, providing a research roadmap.
The proliferation of social media platforms and online communities has inadvertently catalyzed the spread of cyberbullying, hate speech, and other forms of online toxicity, making the effective governance of such harm a critical societal and computational challenge. While significant strides have been made in automating content moderation, existing research predominantly treats cyberbullying governance as passive, isolated detection at the post level. This reductionist view overlooks the continuous behavioral dynamics of users, the structural diffusion of toxic events, and the critical need for proactive mitigation. To bridge these gaps, this paper proposes a unified full-lifecycle governance framework that shifts the paradigm of cyberbullying governance from isolated static detection toward integrated, continuous, and proactive moderation. Drawing on cyberbullying research and adjacent fields, we systematically synthesize the state-of-the-art literature across four interconnected stages: (1) Content Identification, (2) User and Behavior Modeling, (3) Diffusion Dynamics and Early Warning, and (4) Intervention and Governance. Furthermore, we review available datasets and evaluation practices, and discuss emerging challenges including multimodality, explainability, algorithmic fairness, and the dual-use risks of generative AI, providing a roadmap for future research toward a safer and more resilient digital ecosystem.