STRATEGIC OUTNESS AND SOCIAL MEDIA NETWORK FAMILIARITY IN REGARDS OF CYBERBULLYING

Abstract

Once upon a time, social media notifications’
pressure indulged addi ng all friends request, even if the
persons knew each other in real life or not. Nowadays,
youth online behaviour tends to be more critical and
selective with social media profiles and online identities.
Coming out of the closet, or shortly coming out,
rep resents a metaphor for LGBT people's self disclosure
of their sexual orientation or of their gender identity.
Labelled as a privacy issue, coming out of the closet is
mostly described as a psychological process or journey, a
decision making or risk taking action, a speech act, an
emancipation from oppression, feeling of gay pride
instead of shame and social stigma. It has been debated
whether the selective disclosure or strategic outness on social media is a good strategy to overcome possible
prospective cy berbullying attacks. The project Keeping
youth safe from Cyberbullying was developed by our
research team, aiming to deeper understand the dynamics
of different cyberbullying aspects in online environments
among youth, by creating an online questionnaire
c omposed by single item research questions related to
core concepts and perceptions. This paper is focused is in
analysing the effect of social media network familiarity
on LGBT online self disclosure or strategic outness in
regards of cyberbullying inciden ts, in 507 high school
students from Romania, Belgium, Turkey and Spain.
Results show that when modelling effects of social media
network familiarity on strategic outness, the curvilinear
model (7%) is more consistent that the linear model
(6%), when both models show statistical significance.
Psychological conclusions and implications are
discussed.