Cyberbullying: China creates rule to hold websites accountable – 07/07/2023 – Market

China’s top cyberspace watchdog is asking the public to give its opinion on new rules being drafted to make online platforms more accountable for curbing cyberbullying, after a growing number of cases exposed platforms’ slow and ineffective response to combating cyberbullying. abusive content.

According to interim rules released on Friday (7) by the Cyberspace Administration of China, online service providers need to fulfill their primary responsibility of managing content while establishing an effective system to govern violent content on the internet.

This includes illegal and undesirable content that targets specific individuals, insulting or defaming them, infringing on their privacy, or citing false moral violations to publicly humiliate them.

The rules, which are open to public feedback until Aug. 6, provide that online service providers must strengthen review of live content and short videos, and must promptly cut live streams that disseminate abusive content.

They also provide for service providers to offer additional safeguards to their users known as “one-click protection”, which allow the user to immediately turn off any type of message from strangers, including private messages and replies, and receive warnings if they are running the risk of being bullied online.

The rules highlight the need for internet platforms to strengthen this protection for victims of cyberbullying who are minors or elderly, in addition to those who have publicly declared to have suffered online attacks.

Cyberbullying has become a hot topic in China following a string of headline-grabbing deaths. In a case that sparked public outrage last month, a woman in the central city of Wuhan committed suicide by jumping from a high-rise building after being attacked online for her appearance in a widely circulated video in which she was seen crying over her sudden death. of your minor child.

A survey last year of 3 million Chinese internet users found that more than 60% of respondents had been targets of some form of cyberbullying.

The huge number of cases has exposed the failure of regulatory measures by the government and also by technology companies to curb rising cyberbullying in the world’s largest online community.

There are growing doubts about the willingness of platforms, which depend on high-resonance topics to generate traffic, to combat the cyberbullying that fuels the number of visits to websites.

Shi Jiayou, a professor at Renmin University of China School of Law, said in an op-ed on Caixin that online platforms are the main means of communication linking abusers to victims.

“You could say that without platforms, there would be no cyberbullying,” Shi said.

For him, if online platforms play a greater role in the national fight against cyberbullying, it can effectively protect users. At the moment, however, they are not responsible for their users’ online discourse, and this gives them little incentive to play the role of “gatekeepers”.

The problem has caught the attention of top law enforcement and judicial authorities, who last month released interim guidelines to toughen criminal sanctions against cyberbullying.

The guidelines provide, in particular, that online service providers can be sentenced to prison if, after discovering abusive content, they fail to fulfill their obligation to protect users’ cybersecurity by allowing content to be distributed in large quantities.

This text was originally published here. Translated by Clara Allain.