Third International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

Using the powerful collaborative tools of the Internet, everyday citizens have taken matters of social justice into their own hands. Internet mob justice or vigilantism is a common practice nowadays wherein an online community attempts to use its collective intelligence to resolve a social injustice. However, the rate of success is quite low, particularly in large-scale cases where the online community is interacting with institutional authorities, such as the police and news media. In this study, I construct a general model of failed mob justice (that is, mob justice that targets innocent people instead of the actual culprits) using social mechanisms as an analytical tool to map out the causal processes that leads to the failure of collective intelligence. When mob justice efforts are carried out online, they often involve hundreds, if not thousands of participants, creating a complex sequence of events. Social mechanisms are an effective and systematic way from the field of social movements that can tease apart the step by step process of mob justice failures. I analyze six large-scale mob justice cases in the United States and Thailand – not only does this provide cross-cultural comparisons enabling the construction of a general model of failed mob justice, it also constitutes one of the first systematic analysis of mob justice of its kind.