The Power of the (online) Court of Public Opinion

I've been trying to keep track of instances in which some individual or organization makes a decision or takes an action that others consider to be unjust, leading those others to decry the decision or action online and to take some sort of action that, ultimately, constitutes a kind of judgment and/or punishment of the individual or organization. Here are a few examples:

1) A judge made a decision that certain members of the public believed to be unjust. Those members mobilized online and demanded the removal of the judge from his position. In one sense, it didn't achieve it's intended effect (the judge wasn't removed) but in another sense, it has: the judge decided not to preside over cases involving sexual assault and then decided not to preside over any kind of criminal cases. The cause of his decision seems to be the "distraction" created by the online protesters. If the case hadn't risen to a certain level of prominence, if the protesters hadn't been so vocal, then it seems reasonable to conclude that the judge would have gone on presiding over criminal cases, including cases involving sexual assault.

2) A pharmaceutical company made a decision that certain members of the public felt was unjust. Those members decried the decision online and, in response to this, members of the U.S. Congress are discussing ways in which they might change regulation of the pharmaceutical industry. If those members of the public were not as vocal, it seems unlikely that Congress would have taken up the issue. It's too early to say whether this attempt to change the ways in which companies are regulate will succeed in any way, but it seems closer to succeeding before the online outcry.

3) On my Facebook feed, I came across a post from a friend which featured a picture of an individual riding the subway and a description that explained the ways in which he sexually assaulted and/or harassed other individuals on the subway. The friend was re-posting it: she had no first-hand experience with the individual that I know of and it was unclear (as it is so many times with re-posts or "shares" on Facebook) whether the experience was second-hand, third-hand, fourth-hand, etc. Again, it's hard to know what the impact of this post will be: will people who would have otherwise been victims recognize this man and avoid him? Will people recognize him and report him, or shun him or verbally assault him? All outcomes seem plausible.

These instances seem to be getting more numerous and they prompt me to think about how justice is meted out in the online court of public opinion and how the way that happens changes the relationship of power and justice.

How do people respond to someone they feel has done something unjust but is not being published by the traditional form of meting out justice (law enforcement; legal system)?

1) A group of people on the internet harasses someone and/or makes it possible for others to harass the person online and offline.

2) A group of people on the internet ruins someone's (either a person's or a corporation's) reputation. It's hard to say how permanent the reputation-ruining really is. I think it probably varies a lot from individual to individual, but we treat it as a given that from now until the end of time, now that you've been defamed online, you will be unable to get a job, will be unable to date, will have to move, will have to change your name, etc. It's easy to think of examples of permanent reputation damage (The New York Times Magazine had an excellent piece last year about how this happens to folks who post hurtful tweets), but I'm quite certain there are instances of temporary reputation damage that we're forgetting. And that's my point: we can't just rely on memory to evaluate the impact of online reputation-ruining because we won't remember the instances in which reputation damage was temporary.

It's also hard to say at what point a person's reputation really becomes ruined. What is the difference between a large number of people expressing their displeasure at your actions and reputation-ruining? Consider a case in which a person has done something that ticked off many people online. Those people have written a lot of bad things about the person. Those bad things only have an impact if the people reading them take them at face value. But this must vary. The impact of those bad things likely depends on how many good things may counter-balance the bad things. It also depends on how reputable the sources of the bad things are (are we talking The New York Times or someone's blog, a blog that pretty obviously has a bias to it or is the work of someone with a personal grudge?). It also depends on the reader's goal (are they thinking of hiring a person? Considering dating them? Just randomly curious about them?).

Then there's another factor which really interests me: a kind of general savvy-ness on the part of the reader about what he/she/they read about anyone online. It seems likely that in the early history of Google, blogs, and social media, the average internet user would be inclined to believe what they read online regardless of it's source (maybe this habit carried over from the era of mainstream information in which readers assumed some baseline level of veracity because of the gate-keeping function of mainstream sources and the extent to which they were accountable for publishing untruths because they were trying to protect their public reputation). My bet is that as time goes on and people run into more and more inaccurate, biased, or misleading information from non-reputable sources like social media posts and blogs, they will learn to discount information from these sources. If this is the case, a disparaging social media post in 2007 (assuming a non-savvy reading public) would have a far greater impact on the subject's reputation than a disparaging social media post in 2016 (assuming a somewhat more savvy, skeptical reading public). The savvy-ness and skepticism of the reading public must be taken into account when considering the actual impact of online disparagement on one's reputation.

3) A group of people on the internet provide enough pressure to make the person (or corporation) change their behavior. You don't have to engage in any kind of harassment or reputation-ruining to have this effect. Also, I wouldn't really call it a punishment, but it is a kind of judgment. The person or company at the center of it may just make a kind of calculation: "would I rather persist in my unpopular behavior now that it is known to so many people and unpopular among so many people, or should I change my behavior?" They often make the perfectly understandable decision to alter their behavior just so that they can get on with their lives. They don't have a moral high ground on which they can claim that they were being harassed or defamed. A lot of people didn't like what they were doing and publicly expressed this displeasure (which they are entitled to do) and this made life tough for them, so they changed their behavior.

The traditional justice system has flaws: it's slow and sometimes it gets things wrong. The court of public opinion has flaws: people's emotion and the extent to which an opinion is shared by others who are similar to them shape their reasoning. The court of public opinion also gets things wrong, but in a different way. Whereas traditional, established power structures and hierarchies often bias traditional justice systems, emotion and ingroup/outgroup tribalism bias the court of public opinion.

The court of public opinion has a certain appeal to it. It feels more democratic than the justice system. It feels like the people have the power while the justice system feels like (often un-elected) elites have the power. There's the sense that the court of public opinion compensates for the failings of the traditional justice system.

When thinking about any online phenomenon, I always like to try to answer the question, "is this really all that new?" or "what is it, specifically, that is new about it?"

I'm no historian of justice, but I'm pretty sure that the court of public opinion is not new at all. There has always been this kind of shadow justice system. You could do real violence to someone reputation in a small village if you and some other folks disapproved of what someone was saying or doing. My sense is that the group of people doing the judging and punishing are different online than they would be offline. In the offline court of public opinion, you're tried by members of your community. In the online court of public opinion, you're tried by groups of people who a) have internet access, b) have the time and motivation to read about and post about matters of justice.

This leads me to ask a couple of questions (maybe this is the beginning of yet another research agenda!): First, who are those people posting about matters of justice? How many of them are there? What are their beliefs? Where do they come from? My hunch is that public opinion relating to matters of justice as it manifests itself online is really the opinion of a relatively small (10%?) chunk of the public that posts about events happening all over the world (or at least in their country), and that it's, on average, younger and wealthier than the average citizen. It'll be tough to know much about these folks because so much posting is anonymous or pseudononymous, but who knows, we might be able to at least start to put together some answers.

Second, I'm really curious about that "reader savvy-ness" variable. We tend to focus on those posting online, but what about those reading those posts. There might be a certain understanding that develops on the part of the reader, a certain heuristic for identifying sources of more biased, more emotional information (Twitter) and less biased, less emotional information (Wikipedia). Information is curated on Twitter and Wikipedia in different ways: it's not just one big homogeneous internet, and it's hard to believe people treat it as such. Maybe lots of people already use heuristics like this, maybe not. That's why we do the research.