OPINION: The danger is that people, however well-intentioned, take the law into their hands.
The process of taking vigilantism online is called digilantism. Facebook and Twitter activists swung into gear, combining their digital skills with vigilantism morphing into digilantes. Digilantism is an area we are researching.The most recent was the FBI using digilantism to find and identify the Capitol stormers on January 6 in Washington DC. If they can, so can we, right?Distributed “evidence” is taken as factual. A likeness of a person is taken to be fait accompli.
Is there any evidence of crime sourcing events through internet images being “wrong”? The 2013 Boston Marathon, with 26 000 participants, was marred by a sadistic bombing killing three runners and wounding hundreds. The marathon inspired digilantism, and our research, as outraged US citizens, tried all means to identify the culprits.
Charlie Beckett called the Boston fiasco a “media literacy seminar” and hoped that “people are learning to be less stupid. You don’t want to be the person who names a suspect who turns out to be innocent.” The authors themselves tried and did not get many “hits” from the grainy public-posted MMS videos and photographs, although the system reported close comparisons. However, even with the naked eye, the comparisons looked dubious at best. This experiment demonstrated how unreliable the process could be.
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