Japan to start jailing people for online insults

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

A new law that went into effect earlier this summer will make it a crime to post "online insults" in Japan.

The fine for online insult can be as high as 300,000yen. The punishment used to be less than 30 days in prison and up to 10,000yen.

The law will be reexamined in three years to see if it affects freedom of expression. It was argued that it was necessary to slow down the practice of cyberbully.

According to a criminal lawyer in Japan, there isn't a clear definition of what constitutes an insult. According to the law, an insult means degrading someone without a specific fact about them, whereas defamation means pointing to a specific fact about them. The leader of Japan could be considered an insult under the revised law.

Hana Kimura, a reality television star who was subject to online abuse, took her own life. After her death, her mother pushed for harsher anti-cyberbully policies. Most of the research done on children and adolescents has been done on suicide.

There are laws in the United Kingdom that make it a crime to send a public message that isgrossly offensive. Courts decide what is offensive on a case-by-case basis and the language in its policies is ambiguous.