Annotated Bibliography

In the article, Social Media as a Vector for Youth Violence: A Review of the Literature, (Patton, Hong, Ranney, Patel, Kelley, Eschmann, & Washington, 2014), they researched the ways in which social media relates to peer-to-peer violence. This was a study done from two surveys over a year’s period, with students ages 11-16. Cyber bullying is a major part of social media that is included in youth violence. Cyber bullying is defined as “A type of bullying involving the use of online or computer-mediated communication” (Patton et al., 2014). The researchers stated how cyber-bullying occurs in a variety of online settings and how instant messaging was the most common form of it. “Today’s youth are avid users of social networking sites, approximately

“Adolescents who expressed school massacre threats online, as compared to those who made in-person threats, had more often issued the threat with clear intention and had more often made preparations to carry out the act” (Patton et al., 2014). The newest area of research that they found a presence of on social media was street gangs. Street gangs being on social media are described as a form of cyber-bullying because they are often “cyber-banging”, also known as internet banging by police officials. They found that urban gangs use social media to facilitate violence and crime. “Examples of violence and crime on social media include, but are not limited to: selling drugs, downloading illegal music and videos, harassing or threatening someone online, attacking someone on the street because of something said online, and posting videos of violence and threats online” (Patton et al., 2014). Although most gang members prefer to interact with individuals face-to-face, those members with low-level computer skills might engage in general Internet searching activities and those with more advanced computer skills were more likely to engage in cyber-crimes. Some of them would use these crimes as a way of getting revenge against another gang or sometimes even someone in the same gang. Their results concluded that youth violence increasingly occurs in online space and although there may be a bidirectional relationship between online and in-person violence, the specific causes for one type of violence turning into another have not yet been