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In 2020, the importance of the Internet and the vital role it is playing in our lives became acutely apparent as countries fighting the coronavirus asked people to stay at home and conduct their lives – jobs, shopping, teaching, learning, socialising among all other aspects of life, from home. The saying “My home is my castle” made more sense in many parts of the world, England included (of course).
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 also 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, freedom of expression, the raison d'être of the Internet until now; and, on the other hand, social responsibility that should become an essential component of this same raison d'être. 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.
I commenced research on social responsibility on the Internet in 2006. During the first few years, the focus of my research was on ideological, violent extremism (Cohen-Almagor, 2011A, 2012, 2012A) and on child pornography (Cohen-Almagor, 2013). But as the cyberbullying phenomenon grew bigger so did my interest. Every loss of human life is sad; more so when young lives are lost; even more so when loss of life is utterly unnecessary and preventable. I became aware and increasingly troubled by tragic stories of young children who committed suicide following online harassment. Often that harassment was accompanied by offline harassment. I decided to expand my research to include cyberbullying as well.
Moral and social responsibility are required to deal with people who abuse their capabilities for vile, illegitimate and anti-social purposes. We have shared societal responsibilities to address and counter the problems of bullying and cyberbullying. This essay builds on my previous research on the subject and expands on it (Cohen-Almagor, 2011, 2015, 2015A, 2018, 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 (Petrov, 2019). 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.
In previous studies I discussed at length the responsibilities of Internet intermediaries in countering cyberbullying (Cohen-Almagor, 2015, 2018, 2020). I emphasised the need for adopting standards of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) into Internet intermediaries’ business model, explaining that CSR initiatives should include philanthropy, volunteerism, support for community, becoming a voice for disadvantaged groups, and adopting a friendly environmental policy. Such CSR initiatives are important because they evince good corporate citizenship, strong ethical practices, or sustainable business practices both on and offline (Novak, 1996; Carroll, 1999; Carroll and Shabana 2010; Brenkert and Beauchamp, 2010; Gawu and Inusah, 2019). Sacrificing ethical standards for the sake of making profit is a wrong business model (Nelson and Stout, 2021). Internet intermediaries certainly have great responsibility to shoulder. But as I discussed their responsibility in other forums, especially in my book (Cohen-Almagor, 2015), I will not address this important issue here. In this present piece I wish to provide a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art literature on bullying and cyberbullying and to promote parental responsibility as a mitigating factor to counter both phenomena which are currently shielded with considerable chutzpah by free speech arguments. The vast majority of the review is based on articles that were published during the past ten years.