TORONTO – While online vigilante justice wasn’t necessarily on the rise in 2013 (it seemed to peak in 2012), experts say there certainly was more awareness of it this year.
With stories that elicited outrage (think Rehtaeh Parsons’ death following an alleged rape, the Boston Marathon bombings and news of a sex ring in New Zealand where teenage boys lured girls into having sex, then bragged about it online), came stories of digital vigilantes looking for justice.
Unlike in law enforcement and journalism, Johnson said there are fewer checks on social media.But it didn’t always end well for these online crusaders. “These cases illustrated that online vigilantism is generally not a good idea,” said Matthew Johnson, Director of Education at MediaSmarts. “It’s not to say that police and journalists don’t make mistakes, but there are checks on them, and these don’t exist when a particular theory takes the imagination of an online community.”
The hunt for the Boston Marathon bombers
On April 15, 2013 two pressure-cooker bombs exploded at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring over 260. Photos from the scene – in the hours leading up to the explosion and in the aftermath – spread like wildfire on social media.
As police searched a city in lockdown for suspects, users on Reddit began to mobilize. The “subreddit” Find Boston Bombers was created and thousands of users pored over photos, making loose connections to individuals in the photos to the only crime scene evidence released by the police – pressure cookers and a black backpack linked to the explosions. The well-intentioned efforts quickly devolved into a witch hunt, with innocent people being wrongly identified as the bombers.
The Reddit user who started the subreddit said that the photo hunt was “a disaster,” adding it was naive to think the conversations and theories emerging within Reddit wouldn’t spread outside of the site. Reddit’s general manager Erik Martin said on a blog post that the activity on Reddit following the bombings was polarizing. Some Reddit users offered help after the bombings, providing information, donating relief funds and arranging housing and transportation for those affected by the bombings.
However, “though started with noble intentions, some of the activity on Reddit fueled online witch hunts and dangerous speculation which spiraled into very negative consequences for innocent parties,” Martin wrote. Johnson said it showed us that it’s a mistake to focus on particular platforms when discussing online vigilantism – “what’s important is the online community that forms,” he said.
