Learning criminal behavior in Cyberspace

Nowadays, through advanced technologies and tools such as smartphones and laptops, many people are familiar with the virtual space and the Internet, a world much wider than the real world that breaks the time and place restrictions and makes interactions and communications of people out of the material dimension and broadens the sense of freedom.; For instance, people chat about subjects in Cyberspace that they never say in real life. Cyberspace has many positive and negative dimensions, and this article examines one of its negative dimensions, namely learning criminal behavior through differential associations in Cyberspace. The idea of ​​the article is derived from Edwin Sutherland's differential association theory, with the difference that cyberspace associations have more intense effects than real space associations. Utilizing the descriptive-analytical method, this research tried to answer the question of how and by what process criminal behaviors are learned in the virtual world. And what is the difference between learning virtual and real criminal behaviors? The main hypothesis of the research is that Sutherland's theory of differential associations can be generalized and extended to Cyberspace, and perhaps, in today's modern world, learning virtual criminal behavior is more significant than learning in the real environment, since by stimulating the sense of hearing and sight in the form of images, speech, and writing, Cyberspace simultaneously increases the learning rate and becomes a criminal environment, causing the spread of criminal behavior in the real world