Collective Responsibility in CyberSpace

On Wednesday last week, the High Court in Seoul ruled in favour of a man who sued four major Internet portals for failure to delete postings that defamed his character. Essentially the lawsuit emanated from an original posting alleging the man caused his pregnant partner to commit suicide by instigating the breakup of their relationship. The posting was extended across various internet portals attracting thousands of further defamatory comments culminating with his personal details published online. The man was forced to leave his job and move home.

The nub of the Seoul ruling asserted that the portals were responsible for placing the postings in prime locations and at the same time allowed the use of their search engines to further propagate defamation. As such, the court ruled that “Internet portals should decide whether the contents of a posting defames a person's character and should either delete or block access to those postings if they do, even if the person being targeted does not request that they be deleted.”

The Seoul case comes on the back of several others highlighting the difficulties of inherent in social networking and associated technologies and is of particular concern where young people are involved. A Missouri woman pleaded not guilty a few weeks ago to charges relating to an web hoax that led to the suicide of a 13 year old girl. A boy in Brighton was given community service after admitting to homophobically defaming a “friend” through Bebo, which resulted in a failed suicide attempt. There are countless other cases coming to light.

As in the Seoul case, often the dominant view is that portals and websites need to take responsibility for the information posted on their sites. If the sites concerned are moderating comments and postings, this is possible to achieve given intelligent and responsible moderation, but nigh on impossible if no moderation is taking place.

We do need effective, toothful laws governing online conduct. We do need forcible safeguards. But rather than getting hysterical and distracted by the roles and responsibilities of the providers and portals, should we not instead be concentrating on our collective responsibility to our young people and to each other? We have a duty as a society to set good role models for our young citizens, to provide them with a positive experience online and crucially, to help them help each other.

Online environments do foster and harbour bullying, harassing, malign and malevolent behaviours, but so do offline environments. Just as we put measures in place in the real world to prevent and mitigate these behaviours, so must we introduce measures online to prevent such conduct in the first instance. And who are the best people to set down web etiquettes and codes for young people? Other young people.

Imagine the impact of an army of well-trained young people on the next net generation and how they might put to shame their flaming, spamming, abusive, craven, contemptuous bullying forbears.

Sources:
The Argus | USAToday | MSNBC | Digital Chosunilbo

Emma-Jane Cross

CyberMentors - a Beatbullying programme - coming soon to a PC near you!