Mob Justice in the Age of Social Media

Crowdsourcing Justice

This isn't anything new

The public has always had a say in how justice is delivered. Jury trials have played a huge role in the American legal system, considering the constitutional right to a jury trial. Juries allow the law to take into account public opinion, and make sure the community has a say in who gets punished. This is not to say juries are always perfect. Humans are flawed, and juries have always reflected the biases and limits of those who make up the jury.

Just as today, the justice system has not always exactly matched with public perception of justice, and the general public has meted out their own form of justice before. History is replete with groups like the Ku Klux Klan or various mafias, that have decided that the law does not enforce their values, and took matters into their own hands, typically with violent mob killings. The law evolved to combat these activities. By passing laws regarding hate crimes and prosecuting people for the results of mob action, the traditional manner of mob justice is virtually gone today.

Social media intensifies faults in the legal system

Social media has endowed the public with new powers, allowing them to realize their notions of justice in ways beyond simply killing or maiming. Take, for instance, Justine Sacco. A few years ago, she tweeted a few stupid jokes before boarding a plane. Hours later, she got off the plane and turned on her phone to find herself fired from her job and ostracized from the world after Twitter completely incensed about one of her tasteless jokes. Twitter had gone into a frenzy, spitting mad at this woman they had never met. But it didn’t matter that they didn’t know her—countless strangers had decided to make themselves judge, jury, and executioner.

Unlike the past, when controversial criminal cases were for the most part confined to local communities, a case like that of Casey Anthony or Brock Turner can become national news in the course of a few minutes. Simply because of the ease with which news spreads today, a person can glean their entire knowledge of a criminal case via tweets written after reading just a headline. Then, incensed after reading a hive-mind of ill-informed tweets, a person may proceed to write their own angry tweets and potentially try and get a person fired or otherwise ruined. Because action over social media is instant, no one has to slow down and think. No one has to consider things like due process or innocence until proven guilty. The traditional restraints on mob justice are severely weakened.

Dangers of harnessing this phenomenon

What can be done?

This seems to me a very promising beginning. You've got a number of questions to deal with now that you can read what you think. The best route to improvement is to get your argument clearly organized around a central idea. At present, the closest I can come to seeing what it is might be: "Social media conversation can turn into 'human flesh search engines,' such as Korean society has long been dealing with, or the sorts of hurtful organized 'troll armies' now being run in Russia, India, and elsewhere, with the tacit acceptance or direct support of state power. But it can also feel more like small-town mob pressure on justice in a more traditional American mold." This is true. (Thinking about the other cross-cultural examples I mentioned might also be productive.)

If this is your organizing idea, you should state it clearly, and make an introduction that explains both this idea and where you mean to go with it. Then you can develop the idea in your central section, including much material you have in this draft, before leaving the reader with a conclusion she can take further on her own.

Substantively, I think the historical American examples are also helpful in raising good questions for you about the "social media is different" tone here. Jury trial is a form of consulting public opinion as well as reliance on community approaches to evaluating testimony and fact-finding. Jury trial is also subject to biasing and coercion of local opinion. So we have evolved practices over centuries for separating our uses of public opinion in justice with other forms of popular pressure. You don't discuss or evaluate their relevance to the present forms of gossip on steroids, which would be very helpful.

Social Media: A Roadblock to Justice?

-- By SarahSchnorrenberg - 09 Mar 2017

A few years ago, Justine Sacco was sitting at an airport, trying to keep herself entertained as she waited to take off. Bored, she tweeted a few stupid jokes. Hours later, she got off the plane and turned on her phone to find herself fired from her job and ostracized from the world after Twitter completely incensed about one of her tasteless jokes. Twitter had gone into a frenzy, spitting mad at this woman they had never met. But it didn’t matter that they didn’t know her—countless strangers had decided she was the devil incarnate in less than 140 characters. Jon Ronson, How One Stupid Tweet Ruined Justine Sacco’s Life, New York Times Magazine (Feb. 12, 2015).

This is not unusual. Someone has even written a book on what happens when people are shamed like Ms. Sacco. Jon Ronson, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (2015). Internet shaming and mob justice have exponentially increased since the advent of social media, and every day people’s lives can be ruined by other users who like their gratification instant and the consequences severe. Making terrible jokes like Ms. Sacco is not illegal, but millions of people saw the tweet and decided to make themselves judge, jury, and executioner.

Theoretically, social media should not be a roadblock to justice. As our notions of justice should reflect the whole community, outlets like Twitter could help by allowing everyone’s voice to be heard. For instance, the Black Lives Matter movement has been able to bring attention to often marginalized perspectives via social media. But the intersection of social media and social action is not always so organized or so effective, and it can have deleterious effects on the legal law enforcement system.

Justice as a Branch of the Internet

In a world of instant gratification, people seem to expect the same of justice. But why wait the months or years it may take for law enforcement to bring people to justice when you can ruin someone’s life in a moment? For instance, after the Boston bombing, a group on Reddit decided that, despite their complete lack of experience or credentials, they needed to find the perpetrator and find him immediately because they did not want to wait for officials to investigate. This led to a large internet witch-hunt in which they arbitrarily decided based off of little to no evidence and a lot of circular logic, that Sunil Tripathi, who had recently gone missing, was responsible. He wasn’t. But this didn’t stop his bereaved family from facing serious consequences and a lot of harassment. Chris Wade, The Reddit Reckoning, Slate (Apr. 15, 2014).

Others turn to enforce their view of justice because of the echo chambers they participate in on the Internet have convinced them no one else cares about justice as much as they do. Consider the recent Pizzagate scandal, which led to potentially life threatening vigilante justice. After an explosion of baseless accusations of a liberal led pedophile ring in Washington, D.C., a man armed with an assault rifle showed up a Comet Pizza, a longstanding local pizza joint in Van Ness, D.C. He demanded to see the basement of the restaurant, aiming to liberate the children he was convinced were there. They weren’t there because they had never existed. Marc Fisher et. al., Pizzagate: From rumor, to hashtag, to gunfire in D.C., The Washington Post (Dec. 6, 2016). He had put the employees and patrons of the pizza shop in far more danger than the imaginary children ever were solely because he had been imbued with the idea that he and others on social media were the only people who were really capable of meting out justice.

And what happens when judicial opinion of justice does not match public opinion? After Casey Anthony was not convicted, people were vehement that she should have been imprisoned for life because the evidence they heard about secondhand through CNN had convinced them she was a cold-blooded murderer. Alan M. Dershowitz, Casey Anthony: The System Worked, The Wall Street Journal (July 7, 2011). But in doing so, people overlook the fact that our system of justice was meant to be careful. We are innocent until proven guilty, because we don’t want to run the risk of a tyrannical government that imprisons people on little evidence or without due process. There is no process when we condemn others via a tweet. We do not consider the consequences of our words, and in a modern world where one tweet can have such a huge impact, it is incredibly dangerous for us to do so.

How do we respond?

I hesitate to completely condemn reactions to the legal justice system on social media. While we should not take measures into our own hands, I think discourse can be important. Take the case of Brock Turner. I think six months was simply not enough, and many others have vocally agreed via outlets like Twitter. This voice of disapproval can be a huge impetus in change as we let institutions know our displeasure with the current law. But it has to be channeled into a productive route, like inspiring changes in legislation, not ruining a life on a whim.

There isn’t a clear solution to the problem of social media justice. How would Congress even begin to frame a law preventing such mob justice without severely limiting the usefulness of social media? Would this law even garner enough votes? And could it even be effectively enforced? The government has neither the time nor money to go around prosecuting most of American for single tweets. It is far more likely the only solution is teaching people to pause before they tweet. But compassion is a scarce resource on the Internet. I fear there is not much more we can do than watch as Internet mob justice vilifies people for mistakes, and hope that we are never caught in the crossfire.

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