Cyberbullying Need New Laws To Restrain Essay

Cyberbullying Need New Laws to Restrain In recent years, cyberbullying has become a major social problem. Cyberbullying has been a serious threat to every adolescent’s mental health. However, in the current social attitudes, the definition of cyberbullying is still classified as a civil offense. This definition is outdated. The consequences that are caused by cyberbullying have far exceeded the consequences of ordinary civil offenses. Cyberbullying would cause great psychological pressure to the victim, and it often leads the victims to suicide and other serious consequences (Davison and Stein 598). The existing laws lack a powerful means of punishment, and those laws are inadequate to cope with the damage caused by cyberbullying. Society needs tougher laws to restrain cyberbullying; cyberbullying should be classified into the criminal offense when necessary. This essay will briefly review the definition and the phenomenon of cyberbullying, then, it will discuss and analyze the weaknesses of existing …show more content…
Social media has become the most common platform for cyberbullying (Whittaker and Kowalski 16). Compared to the text message platform, social media can generate greater social effects. The dissemination of the text message is point-to-point, where the message can only be read by the sender and the specific recipient. In contrast, the dissemination of social media is point-to-side, which means the message can be read by every visitor after it is uploaded to social media. In the dissemination mode of social media, the recipients could be everyone who has a friendship with the publisher and some temporary visitors. Therefore, the information popularity and openness of social media is often abused, and thus leads to a lot of cyberbullying (Davison and Stein