Really good definition of bullying from @brazenautomaton pulled out from a longer thread.
This isn’t looking for an excuse to bully a kid, this is the process of bullying a kid. Bullying is a moral drama created by the bully in order to get people to agree the target of the bullying is Bad and deserves to be punished. You cannot be a bully without doing that. Bullying is not merely about being cruel, it’s being cruel in such a way that everyone else will joyously join in your cruelty.
I sympathize with @brazenautomaton’s point (and yours), but this really seems overly tailored. When you slam someone into a locker and say “give me your lunch money, faggot” – I’m pretty sure that’s bullying regardless of whether there’s an audience at all, regardless of the relationships between the bully and the audience and the victim.
This is not a nitpick. Insisting that broad widely-useful concepts and terms must be made to fit your particular narrative du jour is a good way to spiral into a discourse of madness. Remember what’s happened, these last few years, with words like “racism.”