The Online Safety Bill, designed to protect internet users, especially children, from illegal and harmful content has passed through its final stage and is just awaiting royal assent before it becomes an Act of Parliament. It is intended to protect children from images and content that depicts child sexual abuse, hate crimes, fraud, incitement to violence and terrorism, among other harms.
The government press release says: ‘The bill takes a zero-tolerance approach to protecting children and makes sure social media platforms are held responsible for the content they host. If they do not act rapidly to prevent and remove illegal content and stop children seeing material that is harmful to them, such as bullying, they will face significant fines that could reach billions of pounds. In some cases, their bosses may even face prison.’
Cyber-bullying is a major concern and has led to many well publicised teenage suicides but while the impact on children’s mental health is well documented, we know less about who the bullies are and why they do it, A recent report form Romania, while small scale, provides some interesting insights.
Cyber-bullying in teenagers – a true burden in the era of online socialization was released in June 2023. A team led by Reka Borka Balas, MD, PhD, of the University of Medicine, Pharmacy, Sciences and Technology from Târgu Mureș distributed an online questionnaire. They analysed returns from 316 teenagers aged between 13 and 18 years who live in rural and city areas in Romania. The enquiry set out to assess the prevalence of cyber-bullying in Romania, evaluate its psychosocial consequences, and examine the factors that may predispose young people to bullying.
1 Do teenagers worry about cyber-bullying?
Of the 316 participants only 133 said they had been bullied online, 183 said they had not