Lack of feedback on victims’ suffering enables harm denial as free speech

Evidence

The social effects of cyberviolence are somewhat ambiguous. Perpetrators lack firsthand information on how their victims are affected intrapsychically by verbal abuse. Nor do they know who reads their postings, whether those readers have had any contact with the victim, and how they behaved toward the victim. These unknowns make it easy to persuade oneself that one’s conduct caused little or no harm and that one is merely exercising the constitutionally protected right of free speech. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 482

Categorization

• XREF: Corroborates the mechanism advanced in Islamophobia-policy vault claims: harm stays deniable when the harmer cannot see direct suffering; maps onto anonymity-driven dehumanization of out-groups.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 482