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Swedish journalists' perceptions of legal protection against unlawful online harassment
Open accessAbstract
This study examined journalists' perceptions regarding the legal system's ability to protect them against online harassment. By utilizing open-ended survey responses from respondents with varying levels of trust in the legal system, the findings suggested a need for increased technical proficiency, resources, and priority within the legal system to adequately address the issue. Additionally, a reciprocal relationship between the normalization of online harassment within the journalistic profession and the legal system's commitment to providing protection was identified. However, the study also found that when the legal system's mediated approach to online harassment is positive, it affects attitudes and norms relating to legal protection. Consequently, it reveals a unique insight into how journalists respond to the message conveyed by fair treatment and respect from the legal system. Notably, this result implies that when such messages are internalized, journalists feel more empowered to take measures against online harassment. As a result of this analysis, I propose that current laws should be implemented more effectively and that policy strategies should be developed to positively influence social norms and social control to bolster journalistic autonomy and freedom of speech in the digital age.
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“There is a consensus within an increasingly large literature that the effects of harassment are distressing (Björkenfeldt, 2023; Celuch et al., 2023; Kim & Shin, 2025; Lee & Park, 2024; Posetti & Shabbir, 2022), but what this distress entails in journalists has not been systematically investigated.”
From An examination of psychological distress and moral injury in journalists exposed to online harassment (2025) · cites this paper as Björkenfeldt, 2023
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Cited by
Feinstein, A., Storm, H., Mead, J., & Sharkey, A. (2025) · European Journal of Psychotraumatology · doi:10.1080/20008066.2025.2522501 · Cited by 11
“Level of stress in work-life and level of stress in life as a whole were rated on a scale from 0 (none) to 10 (a lot). et al., 2024), Sweden (Björkenfeldt, 2023; Löfgren Nils-son & Örnebring, 2016), India (Abhishek, 2022) and Finland (Celuch et al., 2023).”
Metadata
- Authors
- Björkenfeldt, O.
- Affiliations
- Lund University (SE)
- Corresponding author
- Björkenfeldt, Oscar
- ORCID
- Björkenfeldt, Oscar
- Venue
- Frontiers in Sociology
- Publisher
- Frontiers Media SA
- Published
- 2023-04-17
- Volume
- 8
- Pages
- 1154495-1154495
- ISSN
- 2297-7775 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC10149682
- OpenAlex
- W4366224388
- Cited by
- 6
- References
- 2
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 1
- FWCI
- 10.74
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Frontiers in Sociology (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Lund University Publications (Lund University) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Law › Freedom of Expression and Defamation
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Stalking, Cyberstalking, and Harassment
- Social Sciences › Communication › Journalism and Media Studies
- Keywords
- online harassment, journalists, legal protection, trust in the legal system, editorial independence, freedom of expression, digital journalism, social norms, social control, harassment legislation, Swedish journalists
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
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