Engl. transl.: Civil courage 2.0: Civil courage of young people in dealing with perceived violence on the internet

The research project "Civil Courage 2.0" therefore set itself the goal of investigating what inhibits young people from acting with civil courage in online contexts and how this can be promoted. For this purpose, 19 qualitative group discussions with 142 14- to 19-year-old Viennese young people, a representative survey of 1,868 14- to 19-year-old Viennese pupils using a vignette experiment to simulate online assaults as well as 17 interviews with experts from the youth sector were conducted.

"The intensive use of the internet by young people with a high density of online contacts makes the encounter with negative content almost unavoidable. As this study shows, almost all (96%) of the 14 to 19 year old Viennese youths surveyed have already observed negative content on the internet, about two thirds (63%) have already been victims of online assaults and one third (32%) also report their own experiences as perpetrators. Digital violence among young people (1) mainly takes place in social media from young people to young people, (2) is often even more massive than in real life due to the diverse media possibilities and the virtual distance, which leads to an additional disinhibition of perpetrators, and (3) is usually not passed on to adults. Therefore, young peers who perceive online assaults by others (=online bystanders) have a particularly high potential to intervene with civil courage. However, previous studies show that young people intervene even less online than offline and that passive behaviour on the internet meets with high acceptance among young people." (Atzmüller et al., 2019, 4; translated by the coder)