Cyberbullying, organized insult, hate groups are enabled by social networking sites as well as the positive goals that can be pursued within those environments: I just read two Facebook case histories and a series of psychological and legal expert opinions about this in an article on the Financial Times (via Bruno Giussani).

The core of the article is, in my opinion, an intersection of psychological and legal issues: online behavior is generally perceived as less substantial, as if it had no real consequencies. But this is not true, to the point that the system owner himself could be held as liable, if he’d just been made aware of any abuse which is happening on his site and had taken no action in preventing it.

This is not limited to Facebook, but can be true for environments where you can have your identity disguised by means of a pseudonym (in Second Life, for example, is rather unusual to have an avatar with your real name – unless you are willing to pay in order to get your own surname, or you are lucky enough to have your surname in the list of predefined ones). Added to the fact that you are not putting your physical integrity at stake, this could make the whole issue even more relevant in virtual worlds than in any other kind of social networking environment.