Law against online damage: How to define what is damage?

By Magda Osman | Professor of Public Policy, University of Leeds (United Kingdom)

Several laws against online damage are coming into force this year around the world, such as the UK Online Security Act and Australia’s Online Security Law.

There are also new standards, regulations, acts and laws related to digital products (including smart devices such as voice assistants, virtual headphones) and services such as social media platforms.

Of the many damage these laws are designed to address, “psychological damage”, “mental disorders” or similar terms are commonly included. However, when it comes to psychological and related damage, there is usually no exact definition about what these damage is exactly.

Although we can have an intuitive understanding of what psychological damage is, we need precision about what it means in laws. This means classifying what damage is, having a consensus on how to measure it and define the best methods to face it.

Origin of the definition on online psychological damage

How do we do this? An obvious place to look for is psychological science.

The first reference to psychological damage was made in the 1940s. At that time, the term applied to the impact of war propaganda and the use of psychology to subvert the understanding of people’s reality.

‘Psychological damage’ was a broad term, which also applied to those who witnessed the horrors of war on the battles.

In the 1950s and 1960s, psychological damages were more associated with advertising tactics that aggressively exploited people’s emotions and insecurities.

Advancing fast to the early 2000s: Tools emerged to evaluate online psychological damage, along with clinical assessments of mental health disorders.

For example, research on online experienced abuse, such as cyberbullying and cyberstalking, have documented various psychological impacts.

They included voluntary removal from social groups, insecurity and self -esteem leading to mental health disorders, such as depression, anxiety, and PTSD.

New terms have entered clinical and forensic lexics, such as “psychological distress”, “psychological damage” and “psychological injury”. They all concern some form of adverse mental experience that can happen immediately or as a late reaction to traumatic events.

The current position on what online psychological damage is

By analyzing 80 years of work in clinical, forensic and cognitive psychology, here are the main current questions regarding online psychological damage.

There is no agreement on where to draw the line between online psychological damage or related concepts and mental disorders described in the Diagnostic Manual called DSM-5-TR (such as depression, anxiety or personality disorders).

There is also no standardized measure of psychological damage or psychological suffering or damage.

For example, if we use only social media, there are different metrics that vary even in how they measure negative mental experiences in Tiktok, Instagram and Threads, Facebook, YouTube and Weibo.

Why does that matter? An example is cyberbullying. There are 17 tools to measure psychological damage. And since not all tools align, we don’t have a precise image of psychological damage rates.

Some tools are very limited in scope – they do not include severe cases that require psychiatric treatment. And other evaluations are very wide – no longer excluding those that are malignant.

Moreover, the way we perceive and experience adverse events, which can be very serious and debilitating, varies – and they are subjective in nature.

Research in Clinical and Forensic Psychology recognizes this. These disciplines spent time setting evaluation patterns by supporting legal decisions to guarantee appropriate punitive measures when we face terrible situations.

Three practical suggestions for laws against online psychological damage

For legislation to protect against psychological damage from serious adverse experiences online and through digital technologies, forensic psychology offers a way forward.

The first thing is to have a consensus on the definition for example, in 2025, psychologist Amanda Heath proposed a viable definition of general use as “a sustained drop in stable functioning, negatively impacting well-being.”

This works the same way as legal requirements for defining physical damage, which need a functioning line to show how a harmful event causes a change in it.

The severity of damage varies, based on the duration of recovery (such as a week, a month, a year, never).

Similarly, the duration of recovery of exposure to online illegal content would indicate the severity of the experienced psychological damage.

Secondly, there must be a process to demonstrate causality between a specific adverse event online and the damage itself. So far, there seems to be any defined criteria established in safety acts or online damage to establish causality.

Online damage protection laws need to establish a cause and effect

Also in this respect, legislators could be inspired by forensic research, which describes two levels in cases of psychological injuries that establish causality – psychological and legally.

Forensic psychologists evaluate the evidence of the relative proportion of pre-existing factors and events or post-agents to determine causality using something called counterfeiting analysis.

For example, sometimes people have pre-existing vulnerabilities, vulnerabilities, or psychopathologies. Therefore, in such cases, there needs to be a base line, where evidence shows how an individual’s conditions were exacerbated by the experience of a harmful impact.

If we applied this analysis to psychological damage experienced online, it would work like this: Forensic psychologists would consider the evidence to determine that, in the absence of seeing illegal content, an individual would not have experienced PTSP as he is currently experiencing.

Finally, there must be standards for the evidence used to show causality between a specific online adverse event and the damage itself, which we do not see yet to act on online psychological damage laws.

In forensic psychology, on the other hand, legal standards of evidence are high, requiring corroboration independent of psychological impacts.

This is where the Psychiatric Evaluation tools of NPPT, depression and anxiety are used, along with other sources of evidence. Physical results (such as neurological damage) and behavioral results (such as substance abuse, self -mutilation) are also required.

To serve the public, the law needs to improve. This cannot be achieved without an elaborate definition of online psychological damage, evaluation tools and a structure that draws a causal path from harmful content to the damage considered caused.

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This article was originally published on the academic portal The Conversation and is republished here under Creative Commons license.