Discussion on cyber bullying

互联网的进步将对于人的生活以及社会的各方面产生怎么样负面影响和生活、精神等各方面的压力，以及政府需采取什么措施解决这些问题。

Nowadays, the internet has become a new and driving power that delivers information quickly and conveniently. The internet brings much advantage to people. However, certain negative problems were caused as well. Cyber bullying was one of its obvious side-effects. The main reason of its appearance is that the internet offers effective pipeline to spread “gossips”. Besides, people tend to talk more unscrupulously and optionally on internet.

There are mainly three types of cyber bullying appearing on the internet. Firstly, it is the flaming using messages with angry and vulgar language to offend objects on the internet. Secondly, it is the denigration sending or posting gossip or rumors about a person to damage his or her reputation or friendship. Thirdly, it is the outing and trickery engaging someone in instant messaging, tricking him or her to reveal sensitive information, and then forwarding that information to others (Willard, 2007). In my opinion, a new type of cyber bullying appearing on the internet creates more harm to people attached. Someone does something negative behaviors which would be recorded or posted on the internet. Then those behaviors may bring about severe criticism even be found out in the real world. The extremely mental pressure might cause suicide or serious mental disorders. Certain tragedies to the families of these people would be arisen.

“Bei Ren Rou” was one of the most popular internet words in the internet society in my home country several years ago. “Bei Ren Rou” means that people would be recognized in the real world. One of the reasons of the popularity of the word was that there were several tragedies happening that year. For instance, there was a girl, who was suspected to steal stuff from a supermarket, was videoed and posted on the internet by the shopkeeper. After the video was posted on the internet for a week, she killed herself. From the letter she left, the girl ceaselessly suffered from finger point and the criticism from her classmates and neighborhoods that recognized her from the video. She felt that she would live though her life under the shadow of the video. Thus she chose to end her life. The poster felt very guilty for his behavior, even though he didn’t mean it. If similar case happens, who will be responsible for it?

Another example is that the public pressure extremely influences famous people. Recently, a shocking scandal raises drastic discussion in the internet society. An actor, who has wife, was caught to tryst with another actress. The actor was famous for his acting talent and the loyal husband roles he played. The actor claimed that he apologized to his wife very sincerely. Even though he received abusive replies on his microblog, this thing may be forgotten in a couple of years. However, the actress received enormous abusive replies these several days. It’s obvious that her acting career would be destroyed by the scandal. So famous people have to suffer from more rigorous watch by public and they would have less chance to protect their rights. As a result, the above two examples shows clearly that the related current laws in place in my home country for protecting individuals from cyber-bullying are insufficient.

On the other hand, adolescent cyber bullying gradually becomes a social problem. In many campuses, the phenomenon of bullying puniness exists all the time. However, along with the further enlargement of network application, cyber-bullying behaviors towards teenagers are revealing more perniciousness than reality oppression (Ayas & Deniz, 2014). Those behaviors are conducted through sending mails and text messages, online chat and making friends etc. Among them, schoolgirls have higher injured probability. This case not only occurs in China but also in other countries such as America and Canada.

Based on the above discussion, some people hold that network is also the real social space because the experience it brings to people is very real. Cyber bullying seemingly has nothing to do with violence injury, but it is a kind of more convenient mental injury. It can happen at any moment and at any place. In addition, because of bullies’ invisible state, this kind of harm would be more optional and without guilty conscience. Thus the vicious cycle and bigger negative social influence would be easily generated.

As a result, governments in each country begin to pay attention to cyber bullying. To deal with this phenomenon, China issued related policies too. A new law against “online rumors” is such a typical example (Source from China Law Information). The law raises muchcontroversy, but it indeed controls the negative influence of cyber bullying to some degree. This is the great progress in spite of some deficiency. Generally speaking, at present, due to complexity and pervasiveness of cyber bullying, the policies dealing with it can’t provide sufficient protections for all types of cyber-bullying cases that may arise. Thus in order to improve the related laws, I think that the most important thing is to improve people’s moral consciousness about information spreading on the internet because this can solve the problem from the source instead of the surface.

Reference

1. Ayas, T. & Deniz, M. (2014) ‘Predicting the Exposure Levels of Cyber Bullying of Elementary Students with Regard to Psychological Symptoms’, Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 116, 21, 4910-4913.

2. China Law Information:

http://www.dailydot.com/news/china-teen-arrested-rumors-500-retweets/