Article Preview
Top1. Preliminaries
The Internet has comprehensive and far-reaching positive effects. However, its very foundations, based on innovation, easy use, relatively cheap cost, and near-universal accessibility made the Internet open for use and unfortunately abuse. The Internet contains the best, but regrettably also the worse products of humanity. We should relish the many positives and address the negatives. In order to do this, we must balance one against the other two very important values: on the one hand, the raison d'être of the Internet until now, which is freedom of expression; and, on the other hand, the value of social responsibility that should be an essential component of the raison d'être.
The object of this Essay is to discuss moral and social responsibility required to deal with people who utilize the Internet for vile, illegitimate and anti-social purposes. The Essay focuses on the problem of cyberbullying, and on our shared societal responsibilities to counter this phenomenon. It builds on my previous research on the subject and expands on it (Cohen-Almagor, 2011a, 2015a, 2018b, 2020). Virtual users abuse social platforms to harass their so-called “friends”. Virtual “Friends” might befriend others for sinister purposes, not to lend support but instead to inflict harm (McVeigh, 2011). Sometimes these people are using fake identities and accounts. Sometimes they resort to anonymizing tools to hide their identity so they could bully others behind virtual masks. It is argued that social responsibility is no less important than freedom of expression. Freedom without responsibility in this digital era might prove to be dangerous as Internet abusers exploit digital freedoms and target their victims maliciously and relentlessly, sometimes to death.
Consider Ask.fm, a social networking platform on which users can create personal profiles and send anonymous questions to other users. Users can also post photos, videos and GIFs in response to questions. The users’ age is meant to be 13 and over but it is not uncommon for people below the age of 13 to open accounts. Ask.fm has more than 215 million registered users around the world.1 The questions can be innocent and they can also be malicious and nasty. 16-year-old Jessica Laney was asked “Why are you so ugly?”, “Can you just kill yourself already?” The barrage of abusive messages was so fierce that in December 2012 Laney killed herself (Baker, 2012; Fazan, 2012; Murray, 2012; Roberts, 2012; Pendergrass and Wright, 2014). In August 2013, 14-year-old Hannah Smith was “asked” to “drink bleach” and “go get cancer” before she hanged herself (Abad-Santos, 2013). Smith took her own life after suffering constant abuse from ask.fm online bullies who ridiculed her and urged her to die (The Age, 2013).