By ZHANG Qiannan
When a six-year-old boy was killed by at school, photos of the mother protesting in front of the campus were posted online.
The reaction was mixed, to say the least. Most people were sympathetic, upset and felt the mother's pain. But in a few cases – hundreds, actually - instead of condolences, she got insults. She just wanted money, commenters said. Wasn’t she dressed a bit too nicely for a grieving mother? A few days later, she jumped to her death, a victim of cyberbullying.
There is no borderline
China doesn’t have a law against cyberbullying, but a series of recent tragedies demonstrate the urgency for one. In June, the government issued a draft guideline. The guideline shows how offenses can be prosecuted under existing laws. It was open for comment until June 25 and the final version is in the works.
Cyberbullying, for current purposes, is defined as insulting, defamatory, or otherwise discriminatory statements made against individuals that infringe on their privacy, breed emotional distress, or cause the victims to harm themselves.
In real life, whether offhanded comments become bullying depends on the context and social convention. Everyone agrees that calling a grieving mother “nicely dressed” is inappropriate, but does it constitute a crime? The borderline is elusive.
Online pandemic of abuse
“Mocking and teasing are hurtful,” said ZHANG Linghan of the China University of Political Science and Law. In her interpretation, the guideline’s definition covers all kinds of verbal abuse from insinuations to direct insults. The law appears to rehash the well-known internet maxim that, until now, no one has paid much attention to: if you can't say something nice, say nothing at all.
This is not an exclusively Chinese problem, cyberbullying is a worldwide online pandemic of abuse, and much harder to deal with than any virus.
SHEN Mofan of East Normal University, says even a mundane comment can instigate violence if enough people decide to join the mob. He once wrote that an online exchange constitutes cyberbullying if it consists of a large number of untrue and negative messages in a short period of time. "Large number," "negative" and "short period of time" are, of course, open to interpretation.
If you hit someone on the head and that person dies, it is no defense to say that the person had a particularly thin skull, or that you were merely swatting a fly.
Likewise, if you scream in a woman's face and she dies, you cannot plead that she had particularly thin skin, or you were only joking. In the real world, if your child dies in a tragedy that was someone else's fault and you demand compensation, we don't call that "extortion." Overreaction is no defense.
Those who accused the mother of various vile acts got no punishment other than having their accounts banned.
Buried deep in the clouds
Prosecution of cyberbullying is difficult everywhere, even with top lawyers and public support. The guideline lists how different types of online abuse may be punished under existing laws. Posters of defamatory comments can be charged with libel, for example, and organizers of cyber manhunts may face criminal charges.
A year ago, relatives of a teenager who died sued some self-righteous keyboard warriors for inciting online violence. The case is still crawling through the legal system.
For one thing, the mob is faceless and, such is the nature of mobs, a lot of people are involved. ZHOU Zhaocheng, the lawyer for the teenager’s family, presented more than two thousand Weibo comments as evidence. It is impossible to seek legal recourse against every single one of them.
Many comments were already deleted by the time Zhou took on the case, either because the accounts were banned by Weibo or the posters deleted them after the story went viral. But as we all know, the internet is forever, and the comments may have disappeared from the screen, but they still exist, buried deep in the clouds.
The guideline says social media companies should retain evidence of abuse and make it easy to retrieve. Many apps already allow victims to report their offenders and save the history of their interactions in one click, but it remains to be seen what evidence can be used in court and how.
Slap on the wrist
Platforms, the guideline says, should prevent cyberbullying and intervene when abuse occurs. Social media companies can be fined between 100,000 and 200,000 yuan if users harm themselves or commit suicide as a result of cyberbullying. Tencent, one of the very biggest social media providers in China, made a revenue of US$17.4 billion in 2021. Users of TikTok’s Chinese sister app Douyin spent 1.4 trillion yuan through the app in 2022.
Some apps automatically filter out comments with so-called "offensive" keywords, but is "nicely dressed" particularly offensive? Moderation policies vary from platform to platform and there is no ad-hoc agreement on sanctions. Until AI goes through a few more upgrades, human moderators are urgently needed.
LIU Xiaochun of the University of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, says fines send a signal to social media companies that they are responsible for the consequences of the content on their platforms, which, she added, the companies already know. What the companies need are expectations and standards spelled out in with great clarity so they can no longer be ignored or manipulated.
Zhang Linghan says current interventions are inadequate. If an account is banned, platforms often do not have effective means, nor the willpower, to stop the abuser from registering a new account. Regulators of cyberspace, she suggests, can borrow from laws against domestic violence to deter abusers from repeat offenses.
Helping prosecutors and judges
Liu Xiaochun says to make a comprehensive cyberbullying law, regulators and legislators should first identify inadequacies in the current law.
Many existing laws have cyberspace-related terms in them but a standalone law dedicated to stopping cyberbullying seems to be necessary. LI Shengdong, a member of the CPPCC National Committee, said a law will be more effective in helping prosecutors and judges make consistent decisions.
