User blog comment:Sannse/Stand Up and Speak Out/@comment-24445087-20140130223653/@comment-8-20140131190455

I disagree too, ToonPlayer. Of course, ideally we would all be able to shrug off the nastiness and say "it's just the Internet, it's not real". But not everyone can do that, and the number of people who can gets less as the abuse gets worse.

Not only is it unfair to expect everyone to be able to deal with high levels of abusiveness, it most certainly is your fault if you abuse someone to the point of causing them emotional or psycological harm. Just as much as if you did it to their face.

And yes, there can be real consiquences for you too. They don't even have to be as severe as prison time to be significant. There are a lot of people who have lost jobs (or the chance of future jobs) because of what they have done online.

Of course, not all that is claimed to be severe abuse or cyberbullying actually is, and if you said something mild and the target seriously over-reacted, then I wouldn't say it's your fault. But that's not what we are talking about here, and even if we are all our actions have consequences and it's up to us to decide how what sort of person we are going to be in life.... non "online life" and "offline life" just "life".