Cyberbullying Policies of Social Media Companies: Towards Digital Dignity

With a seemingly growing number of incidents, cyberbullying is gaining significant importance in the public agenda. When cyberbullying incidents result in suicides, social media and digital messenger companies such as Facebook, Twitter or Kik, among many others, can find themselves in the spotlight, pressured to respond. Most scholarly research on cyberbullying focuses primarily on the role of educators, families and peers in handling cyberbullying. Legal studies discuss whether there is a need for introducing new laws specific to cyberbullying. This dissertation addresses a gap in academic research about the role of social media and digital messenger companies in intervening with and preventing cyberbullying cases. In the United States, state laws and proposed federal laws contain anti-cyberbullying provisions which stipulate the role of schools in working with parents and sometimes law enforcement to address cyberbullying. However, these laws do not contain provisions regarding the responsibility of social media companies, where these incidents tend to take place. Furthermore, in the United States, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) shields these services from the liability in such cases. The situation is similar in the European Union. Yet, when an incident with severe consequences unfolds, the companies become embroiled in controversy, which creates incentives for them to assume corporate social responsibility and regulate cyberbullying behavior. The primary purpose of this dissertation is to provide an analysis of social media companies’ cyberbullying policies and tools of enforcement. It also provides an analysis of e-safety NGOs’ roles in informing cyberbullying policies and e-safety self-regulatory efforts in the United States and the European Union. As an introductory chapter to these main findings, the dissertation conducts a brief analysis of five cyberbullying cases that resulted in suicides and garnered international attention, whose purpose is to provide the context for the public portrayal of cyberbullying in such instances and the subsequent pressures that social media companies can face. The dissertation is situated within the field of children and media, which contextualizes the nature of youth risks online and tends to assume a critical stance towards moral panics that can emerge around children’s use of technology. It is based on a theoretical framework that analyzes social media companies’ discourse as the culture of connectivity; and the works on privatization of digital public sphere. The analysis provided in this work focuses on the tension between the empowering aspects of the online public sphere for freedom of speech on the one hand, and private companies’ management of users’ civil liberties on the other. The work is based on a qualitative analysis of fourteen social media and digital messenger companies’ cyberbullying policies and all the corporate materials relevant for cyberbullying (documents, blogs, websites); the relevant media coverage both in connection to the policies and high profile cyberbullying incidents; twenty-seven in-depth interviews with company and e-safety NGO representatives, e-safety experts and consultants as well as academics whose work is relevant to this topic. Government documents, court rulings and hearings of significance for the regulatory and self-regulatory framework are analyzed as well. The results focus on how the effectiveness of cyberbullying policies is understood and portrayed by the companies and how such a discourse can work towards eliding the aspects of the issue that the companies may not be willing to discuss publicly; the roles of e-safety NGOs in policy design as well as in the oversight of the self-regulatory effort. Normative questions as to the responsibility of the industry in regulating cyberbullying and the availability of anonymous platforms are raised as well. The Dignity Framework is used to discuss the extent to which such policies reflect an endeavor towards changing the paradigm of youth social relations in digital environments: How may the current social media companies’ and government policies create conditions for more dignified social relations among youth online?