The Legal Response to the Intrusion into Digital Identity in Social Media

Technological advances in recent decades have brought with them concerns about an increase in cybercrime.The fact that the Internet has no territorial barriers makes it difficult to prosecute and punish this type of criminal conduct.Faced with this new reality, States have begun to expressly incorporate the punishment of cybercrime into their substantive criminal laws.However, given the transnational nature of cybercriminality, the creation of global instruments that respond to and prosecute cybercrime has not been considered.The purpose of this research is to determine what would be the most appropriate global legal response to try to curb the intrusion into rights such as honor, the protection of one's own image, privacy or digital identity in social media.To this end, the paper focuses on the analysis of transnational instruments currently in force in the field of cybercrime and on the specific study of the class or type of criminal offense introduced in the Spanish legal system in 2022, the reproach of the creation of fake profiles. Subject matter of studyAlthough the research focuses on the punishment of a specific offense in a specific legal system, it nevertheless takes on a transnational dimension.This is because due to their dogmatic nature the principles of criminal law are shared across most legal systems globally.This paper studies the tendency of civil law countries to legally regulate specific offenses in their substantive legislation, focusing on a specific criminal action and a specific legal system: the separate stadalone offense of creating fake [online] profiles under the Spanish legal system, which can be extended to any other offense and continental law legal system.As such, the aim is to analyze whether this trend of continental law models is the most appropriate response or the best response to combat cybercrime.The main questions to be addressed and answered herein are: (1) whether the response under criminal rules is the most appropriate way of dealing with the extraordinary increase in the creation of fake profiles on the Internet; (2) whether other countries should introduce specific offenses, such as the one incorporated into the Spanish Criminal Code in 2022, to successfully combat this type of intrusiveness; and (3) how could effective transnational cooperation in the fight against cybercrime be achieved.The act of creating fake profiles is always related to identity theft and often linked to other offenses such as scams, fraud, sexual offenses, coercion and damage to the honor, image or reputation of another person.