State trolls are protected by the Constitution

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Will the state be able to eradicate bullying in cyberspace?

In the spring of this year, the network was "blown up" by the story of 12-year-old Tasya Perchikova from the village of Tomsino near Pskov. The girl wrote an e-mail to Russian President Vladimir Putin, in which she described the bad conditions in which she had to live with her mother, a hospital nurse, for 12 thousand rubles a month.

Tasya wrote that in their village the authorities closed the only school and she had to go to classes in the neighboring village, and therefore she could not help her mother with the housework. At the end of the letter, the girl asked the head of state to give her and her mother a walk-behind tractor and a mini-tractor for working in the garden.

This world has broken …

Let's not savor again all the details of the persecution that Tasya herself and her mother had endured from their fellow villagers, suffice it to say that they pursued the "upstart" not only offline, but also on the Internet, where her nude photo suddenly appeared.

The clause about the Internet is important, since it is the bullying that has passed into the network that often makes the victim make a fatal choice and die. Thank God, the girl and her mother endured the most terrible moments of the "village court" with dignity

However, “cyberbullying” - online bullying - not everyone manages to fight without losing their mind, health, or even life. How the resident of Sochi, Vladimir G., did not manage to cope with this scourge in 2011. It began with the banal: the girl he loved did not wait for him from the army and met a happy demobilization "in position." Vladimir responded with a decisive refusal to the proposal to recognize the walking baby and no less decisively announced a break in relations.

The rejected one did not retreat and developed an insidious plan of revenge. She created a fake account of Vladimir on the network, in which she introduced him to be gay. She quickly spread this news to all his acquaintances, explaining that it was precisely for this reason that they parted. The girl approached the matter with great "passion", did not skimp on the army photos of her ex. As a result, Vladimir learned from his friends that he had returned from the army “a completely different person,” their ridicule and taunts did not please him at all …

The investigation into the fact of driving to suicide lasted a year, the "fake maker" in the dock shed tears and claimed that she only wanted to "annoy" her ex

The second story is a good illustration of how even men hardened by drill are not always ready to cope with the consequences of bullying, especially when it is associated with shame for them. What can we say about children who become objects of bullying on social networks and ultimately decide to look for a new land for themselves?

The fact that the state should protect citizens from humiliating persecution in cyberspace was discussed the other day in the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation, where a working group on public control on the Internet met. Social activists have proposed to introduce criminal liability for bullying in the network, which brings its victims, especially children, to suicide.

This idea has already found support in the State Duma: Tamara Pletneva, Chairperson of the Committee on Family, Women and Children, told reporters that she fully shared the proposal of the Public Chamber to criminalize cyberbullying, and the lower house was ready to consider the relevant bill.

Prison or bailiffs?

According to the lawyer of the Mekler & Partners Bar, Anatoly Kleimenov, the proposal of legislators to introduce punishment for bullying minors on the Internet into the Criminal Code really makes sense.

“I think that the definition of a virtual offender and his search is an absolutely feasible task for our law enforcement agencies today,” the lawyer said in an interview with Russian Planet. "There is no problem figuring out who is hiding behind this or that nickname on the Internet."

At the same time, Kleimenov did not support the idea of persecution for the very fact of "trolling" of adults, because, he believes, each such hostile or mocking statement may already contain an independent corpus delicti - for example, libel or a threat to life and health, and sometimes even extremist calls. But often the offensive statements themselves can be legally framed accurately.

“In such situations, it is necessary to use not criminal law mechanisms, but with the use of civil law, raise the issue of removing and prohibiting a chat or a group in which a certain person is being persecuted,” Kleimenov emphasizes. “In addition, within the framework of criminal proceedings, it is in principle difficult to prove that it was precisely because of a specific episode in the network that a person stopped sleeping peacefully at night and his health suffered.”

In addition, the lawyer points out one more circumstance: by its nature, "smart trolling", no matter how unpleasant it may be for the addressee, is freedom of expression, and this right of every citizen is protected by the Constitution

The expert concludes that the problem of the obsession with such "intellectual" persecution can be solved by its "victim" either by completely ignoring (not reading, leaving an unfriendly resource, blocking virtual communication with the offender - "banning"), or, alternatively, resorting to the legal "right into oblivion”, obliging Internet resources, including search services, to remove information defaming honor and dignity.