China News Agency, Beijing, March 7 (reporter Chang Tao) “it is suggested that serious cyber violence be included in public prosecution cases” was posted on the microblog during China’s two sessions in 2022, causing hot comments. At present, there are laws to punish online violence, but “the law is not responsible for the public” is an embarrassing scene often encountered when punishing the perpetrators of online violence. In the face of cyber violence, it is particularly urgent and crucial for the law to “blame” the public.

Cyber violence has a strong “lethality”. It not only affects the public’s judgment of the facts, affects the trend of the situation, and even leads to irreparable tragedy. Li Dongsheng, deputy to the National People’s Congress and founder of TCL, believes that China still has many problems in curbing and combating cyber violence, such as the weak applicability of laws and regulations, the high cost of protecting the rights of victims, and the absence of responsibility of the main body of the platform. Based on this, he proposed that in addition to the state’s special legislation on combating cyber violence, it should also strengthen the punishment of the subject responsible for cyber violence and bring the serious cases into the public prosecution.

Wei Shizhong, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese people’s Political Consultative Conference, also held the same view. He proposed to strengthen the responsibility of the Internet platform by improving the legal system and bring the cyber violence seriously endangering society into the scope of public prosecution cases.

So, how to formulate the standards for bringing cyber violence into public prosecution? Is it necessary to reduce the standard of bringing cyber violence into public prosecution?

Zhou Shihong, member of the National Committee of the Chinese people’s Political Consultative Conference and vice chairman of the Anhui Provincial Committee of the Kuomintang Revolutionary Committee, said in an interview with China news agency that it can not be generalized whether cyber violence is included in the public prosecution.

“At present, there are three levels of punishment for cyber violence. The first level is criminal punishment. For example, if the act of cyber violence is suspected of seriously endangering national interests and social order, the public security organ shall file a case and the procuratorate shall initiate public prosecution; the second level is administrative punishment, which is mainly imposed by the public security organ on the perpetrators of cyber violence, such as fines and public security detention; the third level is to require the perpetrators of cyber violence to pay compensation through civil litigation Pay or apologize. “ Zhou Shihong said, “there are certain standards for whether cyber violence is included in public prosecution cases, which should be analyzed in detail.”

Zhou Shihong also stressed that it is not appropriate to reduce the standard for internet violence to be included in public prosecution cases. If the standard is reduced, the scope of punishment is bound to expand, which will bring a lot of difficulties to the punishment. “The current problem is not that the punishment standard for cyber violence is too low, but that the number of cases punished is too small to have a deterrent effect.”

Zhou Shihong said that in the past, there was often a situation of “the law is not responsible for the public” in punishing online violence, mainly because in reality, the perpetrators of online violence usually appear in a virtual and group image, “resulting in relevant departments not knowing who to punish and victims not knowing who to Sue”.

In this regard, Zhou Shihong believes that it is necessary to track the people and ringleaders of the network through technical means and carry out “precision attack” on them. Those who blindly follow or cajole should be distinguished and punished. “In the case of cyber violence, it is more warning to severely punish the people and ringleaders of the cyber outbreak.” (end)