CFP last date
20 October 2026
Reseach Article

Towards Safer Social Media: A Survey on Artificial Intelligence for Multimodal Cyber Bullying Detection

by Premalatha G., G. Santhi
International Journal of Computer Applications
Foundation of Computer Science (FCS), NY, USA
Volume 187 - Number 141
Year of Publication: 2026
Authors: Premalatha G., G. Santhi
10.5120/ijca776327e249ce

Premalatha G., G. Santhi . Towards Safer Social Media: A Survey on Artificial Intelligence for Multimodal Cyber Bullying Detection. International Journal of Computer Applications. 187, 141 ( Sep 2026), 39-49. DOI=10.5120/ijca776327e249ce

@article{ 10.5120/ijca776327e249ce,
author = { Premalatha G., G. Santhi },
title = { Towards Safer Social Media: A Survey on Artificial Intelligence for Multimodal Cyber Bullying Detection },
journal = { International Journal of Computer Applications },
issue_date = { Sep 2026 },
volume = { 187 },
number = { 141 },
month = { Sep },
year = { 2026 },
issn = { 0975-8887 },
pages = { 39-49 },
numpages = {9},
url = { https://ijcaonline.org/archives/volume187/number141/towards-safer-social-media-a-survey-on-artificial-intelligence-for-multimodal-cyber-bullying-detection/ },
doi = { 10.5120/ijca776327e249ce },
publisher = {Foundation of Computer Science (FCS), NY, USA},
address = {New York, USA}
}
%0 Journal Article
%1 2026-09-19T02:57:21.999812+05:30
%A Premalatha G.
%A G. Santhi
%T Towards Safer Social Media: A Survey on Artificial Intelligence for Multimodal Cyber Bullying Detection
%J International Journal of Computer Applications
%@ 0975-8887
%V 187
%N 141
%P 39-49
%D 2026
%I Foundation of Computer Science (FCS), NY, USA
Abstract

The growth of social media has led to an increase in the scale of cyber harassment, from texts to images, videos, memes, deepfakes, and identity-based assaults. Traditional machine learning approaches are limited to identify such multimodal and context-dependent misuse. This study gives a complete assessment of AI based cyber harassment detection including datasets, preprocessing, deep learning, transformer models, multimodal fusion, big language models, explainable AI, federated learning, and privacy-preserving frameworks. Transformer based and multi-modal techniques offer better contextual and semantic comprehension compared to conventional approaches. The poll also highlights important research problems, such as multilingual detection, bias reduction, explainability, real-time scalability, and the identification of developing AI-generated offensive material.

References
  1. Kaplan, A.M. and Haenlein, M., 2010. Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media. Business horizons, 53(1), pp.59-68.
  2. Kietzmann, J.H., Hermkens, K., McCarthy, I.P. and Silvestre, B.S., 2011. Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media. Business horizons, 54(3), pp.241-251.
  3. Ferrara, E., Varol, O., Davis, C., Menczer, F. and Flammini, A., 2016. The rise of social bots. Communications of the ACM, 59(7), pp.96-104.
  4. Vosoughi, S., Roy, D. and Aral, S., 2018. The spread of true and false news online. science, 359(6380), pp.1146-1151.
  5. Kowalski, R.M., Giumetti, G.W., Schroeder, A.N. and Lattanner, M.R., 2014. Bullying in the digital age: a critical review and meta-analysis of cyberbullying research among youth. Psychological bulletin, 140(4), p.1073.
  6. Patchin, J.W. and Hinduja, S., 2015. Measuring cyberbullying: Implications for research. Aggression and violent behavior, 23, pp.69-74.
  7. Vidgen, B. and Derczynski, L., 2020. Directions in abusive language training data, a systematic review: Garbage in, garbage out. Plos one, 15(12), p.e0243300.
  8. Schmidt, A. and Wiegand, M., 2017, April. A survey on hate speech detection using natural language processing. In Proceedings of the fifth international workshop on natural language processing for social media (pp. 1-10).
  9. Wang, H., Kumar, R., Pattanaik, A., Kumar, R., Khawaf Aljaberi, A.S.O. and Abass, M.A., 2025. Computational methods and artificial intelligence-based modeling of magnesium alloys: a systematic review of machine learning, deep learning, and data-driven design and optimization approaches. Frontiers in Materials, 12, p.1645227.
  10. Vidgen, B. and Derczynski, L., 2020. Directions in abusive language training data, a systematic review: Garbage in, garbage out. Plos one, 15(12), p.e0243300.
  11. Goodfellow, I., Bengio, Y., Courville, A. and Bengio, Y., 2016. Deep learning (Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 1-800). Cambridge: MIT press.
  12. Kim, Y., 2014, October. Convolutional neural networks for sentence classification. In Proceedings of the 2014 conference on empirical methods in natural language processing (EMNLP) (pp. 1746-1751).
  13. Lipton, Z.C., Kale, D.C., Elkan, C. and Wetzel, R., 2015. Learning to diagnose with LSTM recurrent neural networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1511.03677.
  14. Hochreiter, S. and Schmidhuber, J., 1997. Long short-term memory. Neural computation, 9(8), pp.1735-1780.
  15. Chen, X., He, J., Wu, X., Yan, W. and Wei, W., 2020. Sleep staging by bidirectional long short-term memory convolution neural network. Future Generation Computer Systems, 109, pp.188-196.
  16. Devlin, J., Chang, M.W., Lee, K. and Toutanova, K., 2019, June. Bert: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. In Proceedings of the 2019 conference of the North American chapter of the association for computational linguistics: human language technologies, volume 1 (long and short papers) (pp. 4171-4186).
  17. Ruder, S., Peters, M.E., Swayamdipta, S. and Wolf, T., 2019, June. Transfer learning in natural language processing. In Proceedings of the 2019 conference of the North American chapter of the association for computational linguistics: Tutorials (pp. 15-18).
  18. Nova, F.F., DeVito, M.A., Saha, P., Rashid, K.S., Roy Turzo, S., Afrin, S. and Guha, S., 2020, October. Understanding how marginalized hijra in bangladesh navigate complex social media ecosystem. In Companion Publication of the 2020 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (pp. 353-358).
  19. Vogels, E.A., Gelles-Watnick, R. and Massarat, N., 2022. Teens, social media and technology 2022. Pew Research Center, 10, pp.1-30.
  20. Schoenebeck, S., Batool, A., Do, G., Darling, S., Grill, G., Wilkinson, D., Khan, M., Toyama, K. and Ashwell, L., 2023, April. Online harassment in majority contexts: Examining harms and remedies across countries. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-16).
  21. Ray, G., McDermott, C.D. and Nicho, M., 2024. Cyberbullying on social media: Definitions, prevalence, and impact challenges. Journal of cybersecurity, 10(1), p.tyae026.
  22. Saha, R., Ahlawat, S., Akram, U., Jangbahadur, U., Dhaigude, A.S., Sharma, P. and Kumar, S., 2024. Online abuse: a systematic literature review and future research agenda. International Journal of Conflict Management, 35(5), pp.887-917.
  23. Joseph, J., 2026. Digital Attacks and Online Harassment as a New Form of Violence Against Women: Ethical and Legal Considerations. In Policy, Prevention, and Structural Responses to Violence Against Women (pp. 161-188). IGI Global Scientific Publishing.
  24. Milyane, T.M., Rohimakumullah, M.A.A. and Fariza, M.R., 2025. Exploring Adolescents’ Understanding of Cyberbullying on Social Media Through Information Mining. Howard Journal of Communications, 36(4), pp.473-487.
  25. Bachmann, I., 2024. Resilience, support, and feminist counterpublics in online debates of gender-based violence in Latin America. In New Digital Feminist Interventions (pp. 32-47). Routledge.
  26. Pavón Pérez, Á., Farrell, T., De Kock, C., Jurasz, O., Nozza, D. and Fernandez, M., 2026. Still unsafe: what’s holding us back on online safety for women. AI and Ethics, 6(2), p.246.
  27. Yi, P. and Zubiaga, A., 2023. Session-based cyberbullying detection in social media: A survey. Online Social Networks and Media, 36, p.100250.
  28. Akwa, G., 2026. Technological transitions in artificial intelligence-driven cyberbullying mitigation on social media: a systematic review. AI and Ethics, 6(2), p.221.
  29. Diaz‐Garcia, J.A. and Carvalho, J.P., 2025. A Literature Review of Textual Cyber Abuse Detection Using Cutting‐Edge Natural Language Processing Techniques: Language Models and Large Language Models. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 15(3), p.e70029.
  30. Johri, A. and Singh, R., 2024. Cyberbullying on Social Networks–A Crime in India. International Journal of Indian Psychȯlogy, 12(3).
  31. Alabdulwahab, A., Haq, M.A. and Alshehri, M., 2023. Cyberbullying detection using machine learning and deep learning. International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, 14(10).
  32. Barlett, C.P., Gentile, D.A., Khoo, A., Kowalski, R. and Waasdorp, T.E., 2026. The Predictors and Consequences of Cyberbullying Perpetration and Cyber‐Victimization: The Development of a New Cyberbullying Theory. Journal of Adolescence, 98(1), pp.69-81.
  33. Sree, S.S. and Joseph, L.N., 2025. Revolutionizing cyber-bullying detection with the bullynet deep learning framework. Int Res J Multidiscip Technovation, 7(2), pp.38-49.
  34. Pyżalski, J., Plichta, P., Szuster, A. and Barlińska, J., 2022. Cyberbullying characteristics and prevention—what can we learn from narratives provided by adolescents and their teachers?. International journal of environmental research and public health, 19(18), p.11589.
  35. Kim, S., Razi, A., Stringhini, G., Wisniewski, P.J. and De Choudhury, M., 2021. A human-centered systematic literature review of cyberbullying detection algorithms. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 5(CSCW2), pp.1-34.
  36. Elsafoury, F., Katsigiannis, S., Pervez, Z. and Ramzan, N., 2021. When the timeline meets the pipeline: A survey on automated cyberbullying detection. IEEE access, 9, pp.103541-103563.
  37. Mahmud, T., Ptaszynski, M. and Masui, F., 2024. Exhaustive study into machine learning and deep learning methods for multilingual cyberbullying detection in bangla and chittagonian texts. Electronics, 13(9), p.1677.
  38. Abdullah, A., Ullah, F., Hafeez, N., Latif, I., Sidorov, G., Riveron, E.F. and Gelbukh, A., 2025. Cyberbullying detection on social media using machine learning techniques. Computación y Sistemas, 29(3).
  39. Murshed, B.A.H., Abawajy, J., Mallappa, S., Saif, M.A.N. and Al-Ariki, H.D.E., 2022. DEA-RNN: A hybrid deep learning approach for cyberbullying detection in Twitter social media platform. IEEE Access, 10, pp.25857-25871.
  40. Daraghmi, E.Y., Qadan, S., Daraghmi, Y.A., Yousuf, R., Cheikhrouhou, O. and Baz, M., 2024. From text to insight: An integrated cnn-bilstm-gru model for arabic cyberbullying detection. IEEE Access, 12, pp.103504-103519.
  41. Sihab-Us-Sakib, S., Rahman, M.R., Forhad, M.S.A. and Aziz, M.A., 2024. Cyberbullying detection of resource constrained language from social media using transformer-based approach. Natural Language Processing Journal, 9, p.100104.
  42. Akhter, A., Acharjee, U.K., Talukder, M.A., Islam, M.M. and Uddin, M.A., 2023. A robust hybrid machine learning model for Bengali cyber bullying detection in social media. Natural Language Processing Journal, 4, p.100027.
  43. Teng, T.H. and Varathan, K.D., 2023. Cyberbullying detection in social networks: A comparison between machine learning and transfer learning approaches. IEEE Access, 11, pp.55533-55560.
  44. Fati, S.M., Muneer, A., Alwadain, A. and Balogun, A.O., 2023. Cyberbullying detection on twitter using deep learning-based attention mechanisms and continuous Bag of words feature extraction. Mathematics, 11(16), p.3567.
  45. Hasan, M.T., Hossain, M.A.E., Mukta, M.S.H., Akter, A., Ahmed, M. and Islam, S., 2023. A review on deep-learning-based cyberbullying detection. Future Internet, 15(5), p.179.
  46. Ogunleye, B. and Dharmaraj, B., 2023. The use of a large language model for cyberbullying detection. Analytics, 2(3), pp.694-707.
  47. Yi, P. and Zubiaga, A., 2023, April. Learning like human annotators: Cyberbullying detection in lengthy social media sessions. In Proceedings of the ACM web conference 2023 (pp. 4095-4103).
  48. Philipo, A.G., Sarwatt, D.S., Ding, J. and Ning, H., 2026. A Lightweight Ensemble Model for Real-Time Cyberbullying Detection in Low-Resource and Code-Mixed Contexts. Authorea Preprints.
  49. Diaz-Garcia, J. Angel, Carlos Fernandez-Basso, Jesica Gómez-Sánchez, Karel Gutiérrez-Batista, M. Dolores Ruiz, and Maria J. Martin-Bautista. "A fuzzy-based approach for cyberbullying analysis." In International Conference on Information Processing and Management of Uncertainty in Knowledge-Based Systems, pp. 317-328. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2022.
  50. Hossain, M.M., Hossain, M.S., Hossain, M.S., Mridha, M.F., Safran, M., Alfarhood, S. and Che, D., 2025. Fusing Transformer-XL with bi-directional recurrent networks for cyberbullying detection. PeerJ Computer Science, 11, p.e2940.
  51. Allwaibed, H., Anbar, M., Manickam, S. and Bintang, A., 2025. Cyberbullying detection approaches for Arabic texts: a systematic literature review. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 8, p.1666349.
  52. Kumar, D., 2025. A Hybrid DeBERTa and Gated Broad Learning System for Cyberbullying Detection in English Text. arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.16052.
  53. Karpagam, M., Naveenkumar, N., Panguluri, V., Hanuman, C.R.S., Usharani, R., Priya, S. and Sharma, P.C., 2025. An effective cyberbullying-flashing identification on whatsapp using PTS-GReLU-GRU with harmful level prediction. Scientific Reports.
  54. Pericherla, S. and Egambaram, I., 2021. Cyberbullying detection on multi-modal data using pre-trained deep learning architectures. Ingeniería Solidaria, 17(3), pp.1-20.
  55. Zhou, Y., Chen, Z. and Yang, H., 2021, July. Multimodal learning for hateful memes detection. In 2021 IEEE International conference on multimedia & expo workshops (ICMEW) (pp. 1-6). IEEE.
  56. Roy, P.K. and Mali, F.U., 2022. Cyberbullying detection using deep transfer learning. Complex & Intelligent Systems, 8(6), pp.5449-5467.
  57. Hakimov, S., Cheema, G.S. and Ewerth, R., 2022, July. TIB-VA at semeval-2022 task 5: A multimodal architecture for the detection and classification of misogynous memes. In Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2022) (pp. 756-760).
  58. Karim, M.R., Dey, S.K., Islam, T., Shajalal, M. and Chakravarthi, B.R., 2022, November. Multimodal hate speech detection from bengali memes and texts. In International Conference on Speech and Language Technologies for Low-resource Languages (pp. 293-308). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
  59. Schoenebeck, S., Batool, A., Do, G., Darling, S., Grill, G., Wilkinson, D., Khan, M., Toyama, K. and Ashwell, L., 2023, April. Online harassment in majority contexts: Examining harms and remedies across countries. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-16).
  60. Singh, N.M. and Sharma, S.K., 2024. An efficient automated multi-modal cyberbullying detection using decision fusion classifier on social media platforms. Multimedia Tools and Applications, 83(7), pp.20507-20535.
  61. Natrayan, L., Sirisha, J. and JV, R.K., 2025, September. A Multi-Model Ensemble Learning Approach for Cyberbullying Detection in Social Networks. In 2025 IEEE International Conference on Advances in Computing Research On Science Engineering and Technology (ACROSET) (pp. 1-6). IEEE.
  62. Suhas Bharadwaj, R., Kuzhalvaimozhi, S. and Vedavathi, N., 2022. A novel multimodal hybrid classifier based cyberbullying detection for social media platform. In Proceedings of the Computational Methods in Systems and Software (pp. 689-699). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
  63. Jo, C.W. and Wojcieszak, M., 2024. Harmful youtube video detection: A taxonomy of online harm and mllms as alternative annotators. arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.05854.
  64. Catalano, C., Chezzi, A., Lupo, S., Catalano, A.A., Vadacca, R. and Mainetti, L., 2026. Multimodal Cyberbullying Detection on Social Media Using LLMs: A Comparative Study. International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems (IJSWIS), 22(1), pp.1-21.
  65. Fersini, E., Gasparini, F., Rizzi, G., Saibene, A., Chulvi, B., Rosso, P., Lees, A. and Sorensen, J., 2022, July. SemEval-2022 task 5: Multimedia automatic misogyny identification. In Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2022) (pp. 533-549).
  66. Chen, L. and Chou, H.W., 2022, July. RIT boston at semeval-2022 task 5: Multimedia misogyny detection by using coherent visual and language features from CLIP model and data-centric AI principle. In Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2022) (pp. 636-641).
  67. Paraschiv, A., Dascalu, M. and Cercel, D.C., 2022, July. UPB at semeval-2022 task 5: Enhancing UNITER with image sentiment and graph convolutional networks for multimedia automatic misogyny identification. In Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2022) (pp. 618-625).
  68. Yoder, M.M., Ng, L.H.X., Brown, D. and Carley, K.M., 2022, December. How hate speech varies by target identity: A computational analysis. In Proceedings of the 26th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL) (pp. 27-39).
  69. Fetahi, E., Susuri, A., Hamiti, M., Kastrati, Z., Canhasi, E. and Misini, A., 2025. Enhancing social media hate speech detection in low-resource languages using transformers and explainable AI. Social Network Analysis and Mining, 15(1), p.82.
  70. Chhabra, A. and Vishwakarma, D., 2024. Mhs-stma: Multimodal hate speech detection via scalable transformer-based multilevel attention framework. ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing.
  71. Xing, R., Chai, Q., Ma, J., Tao, J., Wang, P., Zhang, S., Wang, X. and Wang, H., 2026. Is AI Ready for Multimodal Hate Speech Detection? A Comprehensive Dataset and Benchmark Evaluation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.21686.
  72. Islam, M.R., Rahman, M.M., Hossain, M.S. and Hasan, M.K., 2024. Cyberbullying and online harassment detection on social media using machine learning and sentiment analysis techniques. Journal of Information and Communication Technology, 23(2), pp.145–162.
Index Terms

Computer Science
Information Sciences

Keywords

Detection of Cyberbullying Social Media Harassment Multimodal Deep Learning Large Language Models (LLMs) Artificial Intelligence