Journal of Cybersecurity and Information Management JCIM 2690-6775 2769-7851 10.54216/JCIM https://www.americaspg.com/journals/show/871 2019 2019 North China University of Science and Technology, China Yutao Han Faculty of Computers and Information, Mansoura University, Egypt Ibrahim M. EL EL-Hasnony Northwest Normal University, China Wenbo Cai The advancements of information technologies and wireless networks have created open online communication channels. Inappropriately, trolls have abused the technologies to impose cyberattacks and threats. Automated cybersecurity solutions are essential to avoid the threats and security issues in social media. This paper presents an efficient dragonfly algorithm (DFA) with gated recurrent unit (GRU) for cybersecurity in social networking. The proposed DFA-GRU model aims to determine the social networking data into neural statements or insult (cyberbullying) statements. Besides, the DFA-GRU model primarily undergoes preprocessing to get rid of unwanted data and TF-IDF vectorizer is used. In addition, the GRU model is employed for the classification process in which the hyperparameters are optimally adjusted by the use of DFA, and thereby the overall classification results get improved. The performance validation of the DFA-GRU model is carried out using benchmark dataset and the results are examined under varying aspects. The experimental outcome highlighted the enhanced performance of the DFA-GRU model interms of distinct measures. 2019 2019 75 88 10.54216/JCIM.000107 https://www.americaspg.com/articleinfo/2/show/871