Cyberbullying and Data Protection: A Comparative Legal Analysis of the EU and Albanian Frameworks

Cyberbullying has emerged as one of the most pressing challenges of the digital age, affecting millions of individuals globally. While increasingly recognized as a harmful phenomenon warranting legal intervention, most existing frameworks approach it primarily through criminal law, overlooking its fundamental dimension as a privacy and data protection issue. Cyberbullying inherently involves the unauthorized processing and dissemination of personal data, making data protection law a critical but underutilized tool for victim protection.

This paper conducts a comparative legal analysis of the European Union and Albanian frameworks governing cyberbullying through the lens of privacy and data protection. The EU, through the GDPR and the Digital Services Act, offers the most developed rights-based model globally, yet lacks unified cyberbullying-specific legislation. Albania, as an EU candidate state, has fully transposed the GDPR through Law No. 124/2024, yet faces critical gaps in cyberbullying-specific legislation, platform accountability, and enforcement capacity. The paper identifies structural gaps common to both frameworks and advances concrete recommendations, arguing that effective protection requires not merely rights on paper, but robust enforcement infrastructure, meaningful platform accountability, and cross-border legal cooperation.