week 11 - Online abuse: how different countries deal with it

Nations worldwide are struggling to address issues such as harassment, defamation or revenge pornography

Online abuse is rife on social media and other sites across the globe but countries are attempting to deal with it in very different ways. As part the Guardian’s Web we want series investigating the dark side of the internet – and the efforts people are making to clean it up – we look at what different legislatures are doing.

With more internet users than any other country – 688 million, according to the government’s last count – China provides fertile ground for online abuse.

The most notorious form is the so-called “human flesh search engine”, by which 

internet users club together to identify and then publicly humiliate online targets who have been accused of anything from corruption to infidelity or animal cruelty.

Zhou describes cyberbullying on social media groups such as Weibo or Weixin as a serious and growing threat to his country’s youth. In a study of nearly 1,500 secondary schools he found that almost 35% of respondents admitted to having bullied someone online while nearly 57% said they had been bullied.

The problem with online abuse in Russia is often not so much that the authorities do not take it seriously, but that they may actually be behind it.

Ruslan Leviev, a blogger who has used open-source information to chart Russian military manoeuvres in Ukraine and Syria, has been on the receiving end of many online threats on Twitter and Facebook. A “patriotic” website also published an home address and phone number that it attributed to him.

“Recently I’ve been getting a lot of calls from people saying they’re going to come and get me,” he said.

So far, none of the threats have turned into real physical action. He has not contacted police about the threats, believing it is unlikely that anything would be done.

I do believe that the Web creates a lot of problems, whether it be hacking or people getting bullied. I think companies/institutions need to do more in order to prevent things such as online bullying as not a lot is being done.