Feasibility of applying defamation laws in cyberbullying cases in Iranian and American criminal law

Abstract

Cyberbullying (Virtual Bullying) is a new and multi-dimensional phenomenon that, although researchers have not been able to provide an agreed definition about it, it has led to a lot of harm to its victims, especially the young generation. Sites and social networks such as Instagram have provided new environments for its perpetrators, through which they publish false messages and information about people, or gain access to people's personal pages, and humiliate them online. This shows the necessity of criminal laws in this field. The purpose of this research is to investigate and analyze virtual bullying in Iranian and American criminal laws in order to verify the feasibility of applying these laws regarding virtual bullying cases. Therefore, in this regard, the concept of virtual bullying, its specific features, as well as related and similar laws in this field, such as defamation, threats, harassment, and extortion, were investigated in two countries, and as a result, while expressing the limitations of civil solutions in confronting virtual bullying and expressing the weaknesses of these solutions to deal with this phenomenon, as well as the inadequacy of related and existing laws, the necessity of its criminalization was determined in the criminal laws of the two countries. In this research, library and descriptive - analytical methods have been used.

Keywords

• virtual bullying
• defamation
• threat
• quasi-crime
• harassment