Where does responsibility ultimately lie?

I'm wondering whether that's the right question, and if not, what's the right question.

IMHO there are usually multiple levels of responsibility, and insistence on identifying "ultimate" responsibility often serves to get outhers out of responsibility (think Bush admin lack of preparation for terror attacks and supporters' argument that the terrorists are ultimately responsible, for example).

In this case, what complicates matters is that the ones most responsible, the abusive trolls, can hide behind anonymity and forever escape their responsibility. Thus identifying the one bearing the most responsibility won't lead to any measure to combat the phenmenon, which, as you point out, stems from an all too widespread human behaviour.

Cyberbullying can be battled most effectively by moderators employed by webmasters who warn or ban the bullies. But most major 'social media' sites aren't willing to monitor content (Facebook, YouTube etc.), and that isn't merely rooted in commercial considerations but also a semi-libertarian ideology (even if at the same time they cooperate with NSA and exploit private data on their own for commercial purposes).

What governments could do (short of Orwellian/NSA measures to demand ways of registration that reveal identity and then government access to registration data) is make laws requiring providers to employ moderators. This of course has the big problem that national laws don't apply to foreign sites.

A further addition from me is that in addition to private bullying, there is organised political bullying that can hit not just protected politicians who have to and knowingly take such risks but nonpublic persons too: when some extremist groups post private data of their detractors or hated persons and maintain public blacklists, or maintain propaganda sites defaming common people.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

Have we noticed that ask.fm seem to think that most of the abuse came from the girl herself? Was that debunked or something?

Physical bullying used to be quite severe in the days my older brothers went to secondary school. It had started to decline by the time I reached that age. I was always c. 1-2 years below average age for my class and of slight build, so that didn't help. Neither did my sarcastic "wit". What helped was that I could run fast and was quite good at sport, as that was a source of status within the school. Being too smart academically wasn't a great idea at all as you might show other people up or expose them to critical comparisons by the teachers. The socially smart kids always had a gang for protection whilst the loners (like me) who didn't build alliances were exposed.

The school went co-ed and the culture gradually changed. The girls presence discouraged physical bullying but may have introduced more subtle psychological forms of competition, conformance enforcing, and bullying.  But overall the whole societal culture changed and bullying wasn't tolerated by parents, teachers and high status kids or leaders anymore. Whereas in my time "telling on someone" was the lowest form of behaviour which could invite severe retribution for the "informer", schools now officially encouraged a "telling" culture. You were now no longer expected to"be a man and stick up for yourself" and expected to do the decent/responsible thing and report bulling wherever it occurred. The "discovery" of child sexual abuse reinforced the trend.  However the skill levels amongst adults/teachers in dealing with such situations varied greatly.

So how is cyberbullying different from the direct physical or psychological kind?  I haven't studied either phenomenon in any depth, but one difference, it seems to me, is the road rage effect that effects people when they think they have some anonymity behind the wheel of a car or behind a pseudonym. They say and do things they might ordinarily feel like doing but would never do openly because of the opprobrium it attracts.  In the example given in the story, the victim appears to have done some of the trolling against herself. That reads like someone who was looking for attention and sympathy - "look what people are doing to me". Low self esteem, lack of parental affection/attention, and all sorts of neurotic anxiety disorders could have been contributing factors. Also Websites shouldn't be allowed to default to anonymity as was the case in the the case highlighted in the story.

But I am unconvinced that cyber-bulling now is any worse that bullying was in the past. The anonymity/publicity factor may make allow it to take quite vicious forms, but in theory it should also be easier to dismiss the rantings of someone who doesn't even know you. What has always struck me however is that some personalty types are very prone to abuse/bullying whatever the context and almost seem to seek out situations where it can occur again - a bit like people who escape one abusive relationship only to enter into another.

There are deep psychological issues here which can only be dealt with one an individual case by case basis and can take years to resolve. Legislation/enforcement to discourage abusive/bullying behaviour is part of the answer, but probably far more important is the development of group norms. There is also a maturing process as people get used to new media. I seem to recall quite a lot of trolling and abusive behaviour on ET which wasn't always handled well, and now I haven't seen any of it in ages. I'm not involved in moderation or open threads, so perhaps I'm missing it. But I can't imagine "the community"  tolerating it for any length of time.

So I'm a big fan of self-moderating groups because they can also become self-maturing groups. I avoid moderated blogs because of the time delays involved and the resources required to moderate all content on something like twitter seems unrealistic. The reporting of abuse mechanisms, the banning/shaming of offenders, and the general reaction of the online community seems to work quite well in all but rare, exceptional cases. That is not to say abuse doesn't happen, but does it happen all that much more often than in "real life" specially amongst vulnerable teenagers?

In the case in question it is convenient for society and the parents to blame everything on the remote cyberbully, and that is understandable in their time of grief. However we also need to train parents to recognise the signs and vulnerabilities and needs of their own children. Parenting has, to me, always seemed like one of the most difficult and skilled jobs one can ever undertake, and it is remarkable that most of us have never received any significant amount of formal training for it. But that is another story...

Index of Frank's Diaries

In this case, I would assign the lion's share of responsibility to the educators, parents and other supposedly responsible persons who failed to teach her to use the most elementary tool in the online safety toolbox: The "off" button.

A forum which tolerates covering a user's "wall" with obscene, abusive graffiti contains nothing that you cannot get better elsewhere. Privately notify those users you want to offer the opportunity to remain in touch, then change the password on your account to a random alphanumeric string and set your e-mail to delete irrevocably and without notification any communication originating from that domain name.

If your self esteem is low enough that you do not believe that you can find a better online community that will accept you as a member, then your problem is that you have a serious mental disorder that you really should get professional help for. And if you're a teenager, the adults in your life really should be paying attention to that sort of thing.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

It's not only 14 year old girls.

Plague of game dev harassment erodes industry, spurs support groups:

The greatest threat to the video game industry may be some of its most impassioned fans. Increasingly, game developers are finding themselves under attack by some of the very people they devote their lives to entertaining. And this growing form of gamer-on-game-developer cyber harassment is starting to take its toll.

<snip>

The internet and the anonymity it grants has made harassment easier. According to several studies, Fisk said, the lack of social cues and perceived lack of consequences afforded online communication also changes the way people treat one another.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

In the age of NSA surveillance my 84 year old grandmother (who doesn't use a computer for anything other than Solitaire) recently gave me a lecture on how nothing on the internet is private. Presumably that awareness is reaching young kids as well, and indeed, that their online actions are more traceable and undeniable than their offline actions. I suspect this will ultimately result in a lot less on-line abuse - although that also depends on more effective international enforcement of laws against remote abuse.

In the early days of email at work there were some  instances of people accidentally hitting the "reply all" instead of the "reply" button when they were making some not altogether flattering comment on a colleague or proposal. People very quickly learned that a supposedly "private" comment in an email could end up just about anywhere and adjusted their behaviour accordingly. Now anyone I know more or less assumes that anything they do on line could end up becoming known to people they might not have wanted to to involve in the process.

But it will take time for that to become more generally known and for on-line social norms to evolve accordingly...

Index of Frank's Diaries

Honestly I believe ( one of my conspiracy theories, haha) that they intentionally are killing empathy in people because it's good for consumerism, that is religion of today's societies (especially western one but others too).
They are killing empathy starting from very early age by promoting a sick side of individualism and at the same time sick side of "comunity-sm" , by confusing people's feelings.
They are killing people in order to save them :( ... killing them in masses to bring so called democracy that they do not even want or really understand how it is functioning...They are spying millions (potentially billions)of us to make us safe. They are promoting greed as engine for our ever growing economies as a healthy thing so we need to always ask for MORE and never be happy with where we are and what we have and even who we are ...Celebrity culture comes to mind...they first make them celebrities , explore them and in the end are bushing them ...
I am sure there are millions of researches done on how we ended up here ...my point is that it was planed and with specific task in mind...But the end result I assume is not going to be that pretty and ugly face of this lack of empathy  is already showing...    

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind...Albert Einstein

I've never understood any of this.  I've raised four kids beyond 14 years in the Cyber Age, and none has ever been so wedded to a website to be unable to walk away if jerkitude proliferated.  When there was bullying IRL, which there was, they came to Mummy and me because they actually had a relationship with us.

Which brings me to your final question.  She was your kid, Dad.  Why couldn't she come to you?  Why couldn't you see she was having issues?

And why couldn't she just walk away from a mismanaged site?  I used to post a lot on DKos, but I got fed up with their near-total inability to rein in the asshats, such as the US-based Russophiles who believe they're the only ones who should comment on anything east of Berlin and abuse anyone who does.  Who needs that crap?  And how do you make your life so dependent on unfettered access to a website that, if you lose the latter, you end the former.