Reflections Digital Criminology

Being Mean Online and Cyber Crime

Broll and Huey (2015) point out that cyberbullying represents a gray area when it comes to criminal justice, legislation, policing, and prevention. Police prefer to address this matter through education, trying to teach young people and communities how to avoid cyberbullyingbut they also do not see every case of cyberbullying as a police matter. Part of the issue here is that there is no substantial legislation that would define cyberbullying as a criminal offense. Being mean to someone online, in other words, is hard to define and hard to outlawbut other questions do arise: such asis someone engaging in stalking that is a legitimate threat to another persons safety or privacy? Is someone engaging in abusive conduct online that is meant to harm the other person in a real way by, for example, getting the other person to commit suicide? These are real questions that need to be asked and should be addressed by law enforcement and legislators, because it is certainly the case that cyber bullying has led to suicides, violence, and invasions of privacy in the past. So how can police better address this matter?

On the other hand, society has become so sensitive that cancel culture has become a significant movement, and anytime anyone says anything to offend a group online that group might respond with a call for censorship, prosecution, or any other form of retribution: people are quick to lose jobs, careers, reputation, and status after being targeted by the cancel culture movement. So who is really bullying whom here? Does it not seem that in an attempt to eradicate bullies, the cancel culture movement has become a bully? How does one address this problem in the context of cyber bullying and cyber crime? Who should get to define what is permissible and what is off limits? This is a question I would like to look more into as it dovetails with earlier questions raised from the readings about the digital citizenship, e-crime, and victimization. Khoo (2021) argues that gender-based violence occurs on platforms like social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and others, and that these companies and their platforms need to be policed and that action needs to be taken to prevent or root out misogynistic words and actions by users...

She recommends platform liability models that would provide better protections for womenbut to what extent should this kind of recommendation be resisted? How does one draw the line between being rude or being offensive, and being criminal or liable in the court of law? It seems that this attempt to criminalize meanness online is an encroachment on what others might call free speech rights. If people begin to feel they are being denied their rights, there might be pushback and an even worse outcome than beforeand I think about what Prohibition did for the criminal world in the US in the 1920s. It really brought organized crime into existencean unforeseen consequence of too much policing.

References

Broll, R., & Huey, L. (2015). Just being mean to somebody isnt a police matter: Police

perspectives on policing cyberbullying.Journal of School Violence,14(2), 155-176.

Khoo, C. (2021). Deplatforming misogyny. Womens Legal Education and Action Fund

(LEAF).

Digital Evidence

Dodge (2018) examines the nature of...

…do not want in power. Labels are applied to prevent some undesirables from having any footing or status or integration in society. That is the point of labels in labeling theory. In the article on digital degradation, labels are used to keep people with offenses in their record from ever having another shot at life. There are Mug Shot websites, as the researchers point out, that contribute to ongoing public shaming; digital archives, such as Google, that allow for something like a court appearance to be indexed online; crowd-sourcing and data collection are conducted to preserve this material (Lageson & Maruna, 2018). So it seems that no one is allowed to be forgotten, and everyone must live in terror of ever committing an offensebecause once one does the wrong thing one time, one might as well write oneself out of existence because society will never accept you back into the flock.

Perhaps that is the true digital crime herethat digitalization has enabled society to turn offenders into pariahs. There is no forgiveness, no acceptance, no understanding: only a vicious kind of finger-pointing, shaming, and judging that goes on for eternityor for as long as the Internet keeps the digital files alive for all to see. Sometimes people are even applying labels and shaming others who faced accusations but never were convicted of a crimeso that is another point that should be considered. Where do we as a society and in terms of law draw a line on this type of behavior? It seems that if it is not addressed, society will become twisted into a two-tier societybut perhaps it is already there…