Language (Im)Politeness Online. The act of body shaming analysed via comments to VIPs posts on social media

Cyberbullying is one of the main bad effects that language impoliteness used online generates. This is an act of bullying which instead of happening in Face-to-Face communication, it happens in Computer Mediated Communication, thus via chat rooms, instant messaging, email.
Happening in the cyber world, cyberbullying may not cause any direct physical damage, but it is very likely to cause psychological damage to the victim, as addressed in Chapter 2 of this work, such as depression, low self-esteem and it can even lead to suicide. The effect is dangerous to the victim because at an extreme level, the victim may get to suicidal thoughts and in a more extreme level commit suicide for real (Indrawan, 2018).
Mostly in every social media it can be found a kind of cyberbullying act and on Instagram it is mostly found in the ‘comments’ section, as it can be seen for case studies of 2.4.1, 2.4.2, 2.4.3. It is because in this section users can react and reply to other users’ comments. The users tend to leave an aggressive comment on controversial posts or on posts by controversial people Instagram is indeed the best place for cyber-bullies to seek for their victims, since that its users mostly share their aspects of everyday life which can be seen and responded by other users. That is why, cyber-bullying is said to be the most prevalent in Instagram (42%) (Petrov, 2019).
It appears that comments made by Instagram users with bullying content are mainly following the strategies of impoliteness proposed by Culpeper (2011). Thus, cyberbullying and impoliteness are related. Cyberbullying aims to do negative act to people by doing harassing, abusing, insulting, and many others. Impoliteness is also a negative act towards the addressee (Indrawan, 2018).