How to fight cyber bashing?
Public prosecutors in the city of Naples in Italy have launched an investigation into incitement to suicide after a 31-year-old woman hanged herself. Videos with sexual content in which the woman could be clearly identified had been circulating on the Internet for years, and she had been insulted and mocked on social media because of this. Italy's press is appalled and appeals to Internet users to act responsibly and show compassion.
Publishing means to bearing responsibility
The woman from Naples was granted a court injunction according to which the videos containing footage of her should be removed from the Internet. But the right to be forgotten on the web can only be established if users play along, La Repubblica warns:
“If content remains online despite there being good reasons to delete it this is because there are people who continue to publish it. People who are sick, ignorant or shallow. Technology can only provide a partial solution, for example with a digital finger print that makes content traceable to its publisher. But we must focus on educating people. We must make sure everyone understands that publishing something means bearing responsibility for it. It may seem like just a click, just pushing a key, but behind that click there is a person, a family, friends, a job. … Can we comprehend the consequences of our clicks? It's a matter of digital education.”
A world without compassion
The torrent of images with which we are confronted these days has made us inhumane, La Stampa comments in dismay:
“For a long time now war, violence, murders, disasters have been our daily bread, our habitual media diet. We swallow it all with cynical greed. Sated and lethargic after all these images of horror, we have lost our capacity to empathise with other people's suffering. … We live in a time in which obscenity reigns supreme. What we have lost in this age is compassion. What has been driven out of this world is pity. The existence we are living out each day in the glasshouse of media transparency is one without compassion. Faced with these images we must learn to remain human. To become human again every day. Starting by feeling compassion for the victims.”