There was once a popular fantasy that the online world was a free-
for-all where there were no rules and nobody got hurt. This fantasy re-
lied on a belief that everything that happened online was artificial or
“not real” because it all happened through a computer in what seemed
to be a virtual world. As a result, many Internet users thought of the
Internet as the Disney cartoon version of Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island:
a place where antisocial and forbidden behavior could be carried out
without any consequences. But the fantasy that the “virtual world” does
not affect the “real world” is simply not true: the online world is part of
the “real” world. Real ...