I am not sure if this is new ( I hadn’t really paid much attention to bullying until it became popular in the news recently) but this is how I find things different today as compared to simple name calling and physical abuse.
Today, bullying is more of back-stabbing friends, manipulating, omitting the truth, lying, verbal abuse, stalking, rumor-spreading, mind games, denying ( “I don’t know what you are talking about”) and lots of implying. These “bullys” are popular among other students and will get decent to good grades and go off to college (they do study however cheating is prominent). There activities are known among a circle of kids and are mostly aided by group of these kids in their activities against a target. It can end up as everyone in the social environment of the target versus the target. It is also possible for the target to get manipulated and end up doing actions that can be seen as incriminating. If trying to report the bullying, its possible for the victim to sound crazy as a common counter argument is that the victim is assuming and wrongly deciphering the implications, gestures and other non verbal hostility displayed especially if the bullys seem to have a better social status than them (popularity, better grades etc, support/familiarity with teachers)
Basically its a “White-Collar” bullying system. Sometimes its hard to take notice of the dirt in it by observing it from the outside.