Bytesforall Bangladesh has developed this document to guide the users in Bangladesh on what they should and shouldn’t do in social media. This guide will help them to understand what protective measures they can take in order to avoid situation where they become a victim of online violence, harassment or other crimes.
Bangladesh telecom regulatory authority suggests that in August 2019 Bangladesh has more than 98 million Internet subscribers which is around 42% of the total population. The growth of internet penetration and bandwidth redundancy have expanded social media access and usage in the country. For example, there are about 32 million Facebook users from Bangladesh, out of which close to 8 million are thought to be female users. Although there is no way of knowing how many of these Facebook accounts are with fake IDs. A popular Bengali newspaper in Bangladesh, Prothom Alo published a report quoting a social media analytic (Socialbakers) that – 73% of Facebook users in Bangladesh are at the age group of 13-25, 20% are at the age group of 26-34, 5% are at 35-45 age group and the rest 2% are above of the age of 45. So a predominant number of social media users in Bangladesh are young people. As per another estimate, Instagram has 1.3 million users in Bangladesh. Over 90% of all Instagram users living in Bangladesh are younger than 35. This also shows the prevalence of Internet access via cell phone. As per Bangladesh Telecom Regulatory Commission data, cell phone based Internet access constitutes 93% of all Internet users in Bangladesh.
But as the Internet user base grows, here comes the issues of various online crimes including cyber stalking, cyber harassment, morphing and obscene publication, email/profile hacking, spoofing, cyber pornography including revenge porn, internet voyeurism, cyber defamation, cyber bullying, e-mail harassment, cyber blackmailing, threatening, emotional cheating by impersonation, intimate partner violence through internet and abetment of such offences.