The Dark Side of Digitalization

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Abstract
Digital change and transformation, affecting the economic and social context, paved the way for the emergence of many new phenomena and behavior patterns. One of these phenomena is digital mobbing, which is a serious type of digital bullying that harms the individual and forms the dark side of digitalization. In this chapter, the authors explained the phenomenon of digital mobbing, its types, and effects on individuals first. Then they conducted a field research to reveal employees' level of exposure to digital mobbing, its types, level, and suggestions for its prevention via snowball sampling method in Istanbul and Kocaeli with 578 white-collar employees in the healthcare, information technologies, security, and banking sectors through the Turkish adaptation of the “cyber-mobbing” scale developed in Germany. According to the results, they found that the vast majority of employees are exposed to high level and various forms of digital mobbing and they couldn't find authorities to apply for a solution other than legal remedies; so they also suggested for its prevention at last.