Main takeaways from China’s first draft Anti-Cyberbullying Law

China’s first dedicated legislation targeting cyberbullying has been unveiled, with the Cyberspace Administration of China and relevant departments releasing the Anti-Cyberbullying Law (Draft for Solicitation of Comments) for public feedback.

The legislation targets various aspects of cyberbullying as rumours spread rapidly online, while acts like doxxing, cyber-mobs and malicious image tampering spill from virtual spaces into reality, severely infringing on civil rights and causing deep distress to public figures and ordinary citizens alike.

This article outlines the core takeaways of the draft and offers key compliance insights.

Key points

A more precise legal definition of cyberbullying. The Draft defines cyberbullying as collective or continuous online acts against individuals or organisations that infringe upon rights to reputation, honour, privacy, portrait and personal information. These include:

1. Co-ordinated publishing of insulting, defamatory, hate-inciting, antagonistic, coercive or discriminatory content;
2. Unlawful publishing of personal information in a targeted manner;
3. Continuous online intimidation or harassment; and
4. Other acts of cyberviolence infringing on lawful rights.

This definition features three distinct characteristics:

1. It requires “co-ordinated” or “continuous” acts, covering both short-term flash mobs and sustained sporadic harassment;
2. It explicitly brings unlawful collective release of others’ personal information – namely mass doxxing – under legal regulation; and
3. It includes a catch-all provision to maintain legal flexibility for addressing emerging forms of cyberbullying.

The draft establishes clear regulatory red lines for identifying cyberbullying, providing dedicated legal qualification criteria for pervasive online misconduct such as malicious video editing, rumour mongering, unlawful disclosure of personal data, and other privacy breaches.

Platform governance is the cornerstone of upstream risk mitigation. Given their product, service and technical features, platforms have always been critical to online content ecosystem governance.

The draft further reinforces primary platform responsibilities, requiring the systematic construction of a full lifecycle governance framework spanning preemptive prevention, in-process handling and post-incident safeguards.

On pre-emptive prevention, network service providers must establish robust cyberbullying monitoring and identification mechanisms – including feature libraries, benchmark case repositories and early warning models – using a mix of AI, big data and manual reviews.

This means platforms can no longer hide behind “technological neutrality” to shirk duties, but must actively invest technology and resources into monitoring, identifying and warning against cyberbullying.

On in-process handling, platforms are strictly banned from driving traffic to cyberbullying content via algorithmic recommendations. Upon discovering cyberbullying material, platforms must immediately halt transmission, execute disposal measures such as deletion, blocking, link severance and necessary account restrictions, and incorporate cyberbullying infractions into account credit rating systems.

On post-incident safeguards, platforms must provide prominent, rapid evidence collection tools to help users protect their legal rights. Platforms are also required to establish robust rumour debunking mechanisms, take prompt corrective action and, crucially, take immediate action upon receiving notification from victimised users to halt cyberbullying and prevent information proliferation.

Notably, the draft explicitly requires platforms to enhance the prevention and governance of cyberbullying content created, replicated, published or disseminated using AI technology, enforcing systems such as AI-generated and synthetic content labelling.

This echoes existing AI legislation and establishes clear obligations for platforms to proactively identify and trace emerging cyberbullying practices like AI face-swapping and deepfakes.

Expanding judicial protection pathways and strengthening enforcement. The draft introduces a personality rights injunction system, offering victims a rapid legal remedy to effectively halt the exponential spread of harmful content.

Additionally, where public security authorities decide against imposing administrative penalties on cyberbullying perpetrators, they may issue a cyberbullying warning notice.

Both this warning notice and the above-mentioned injunction can be admitted as evidence in court to substantiate cyberbullying violations and offences.

The penalty framework of the draft embodies the legislative principle of proportionate punishment, significantly raising the legal costs of cyberbullying.

It details specific penalties and fine brackets for various violations by participants and authorises relevant authorities to impose credit-based disciplinary measures on those listed on the online credit blacklist.

Additionally, the draft affirms that natural persons suffering severe mental distress from cyberbullying are entitled to claim mental-damage compensation.

Compliance advice

The release of the draft marks a new phase in China’s cyberbullying governance, shifting from fragmented rules to systematic prevention.

For internet users, it functions as both a shield for rights and a mirror for compliance. Victims can leverage legal tools like personality rights injunctions, swift evidence gathering and private prosecution support – while all users must remain mindful of speech boundaries and legal liabilities to avoid becoming a cyberbully.

Internet service providers must step up platform obligations, effectively integrating platform governance with state regulation and public co-governance, while ensuring that platform protections and judicial remedies complement one another.

Quan Wei is a partner at Jingtian & Gongcheng