Addressing Cyber Harm in the Age of Platform Power: Comparative Insights into Legal, Technical, and Educational Responses

This paper examines how cyber harm, the malicious use of digital technologies and online platforms to harass or persecute others, is not only tolerated but enabled by the commercial architectures and incentive structures of dominant social media platforms. It argues that cyber harm should not be understood as the incidental product of malicious individuals, but as a structural feature of the attention economy that monetises outrage, rewards volatility, and externalises its costs onto users and societies. Drawing on insights from media studies, law, sociology, and political economy, the paper situates cyber harm within broader debates on platform governance. It systematically evaluates international responses to cyber harm across technical, legal, and educational domains, exposing the trade-offs and contradictions that blunt their effectiveness. Building on this analysis, the paper advances four recommendations that reorient debate towards the structural drivers of harm and the logics of algorithmic governance: institutionalising digital literacy as a public good, developing interoperable cross-border enforcement mechanisms, establishing comparative multilingual datasets for research, and embedding algorithmic governance in transparent, consultative processes.