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Online harassment and bullying are a fact of life in modern societies, not just in schools but in workplaces too, as people jostle for rank, mates and resources. From the media stories of teens who kill themselves following online abuse, you might think that cyber-bullying now accounts for most of the problem – at least at school – but the figures show that it's less than half. An annual UK survey discloses that about a quarter of children and young people are constantly bullied (13% verbal, 5% cyber and 3% physical) while about half are bullied sometimes (24%, 8% and 9% respectively) [565]. The only national survey of all ages of which I'm aware is the French national victimisation survey, which since 2007 has collected data not just on physical crimes such as burglary and online crimes such as fraud, but on harassment too [1460]. This is based on face-to-face interviews with 16,000 households and the 2017 survey reported two million cases of threatening behaviour, 7% were made on social networks and a further 9% by phone. But have social media made this worse? Research suggests that the effects of social media use on adolescent well-being are nuanced, small at best, and contingent on analytic methods [1475].

Yet there is talk in the media of a rise in teen suicide which some commentators link to social media use. Thankfully, the OECD mortality statistics show that this is also untrue: suicides among 15–19 year olds have declined slightly from about 8 to about 7 cases per 100,000 over the period 1990–2015 [1479].