A Prison Sentence Ends. Google Doesn’t

Young people make mistakes, sometimes egregiously. But even when the mistakes lead to people being deeply hurt, do the perpetrators deserve at least some discretion when it comes to negative publicity? The recent saga of several Cornell students being indicted for raping a female peer at a fraternity house left me with this question. There is no doubt that the seven young men deserved the legal penalties that the relevant court meted out. But while the female victim remained anonymous, and rightly so, the seven young men have had their names and pictures posted all over the internet.

Years ago, China was doing some soul-searching about the prevalent practice of human flesh search (人肉搜索), the idea of someone posting a request online to find a person, and the masses of netizens using their local resources to efficiently get to the target. Most of the requests that the netizens enthusiastically took up related to criminal activities that the masses would have been outraged by. Unsurprisingly, given the internet-based nature of the process, the identified person's personal information is then posted online for the public to see, without any form of consent being asked. 

The soul-searching relates to the sheer damage that came from each success in identification. The original posters sometimes spun exaggerated, embellished, and sometimes outright false accusations to appeal for the netizens' help, using deceit to spur that sense of altruistic support central to a successful human flesh search. But rarely do people ask the identified individuals for their stories, asking them whether they are as evil as the search requesters portray them to be. By the time their information goes up online, it's too late. Their reputations and careers are quickly ruined. 

That downside of vigilante justice sees an equivalent in what the netizens dubbed the Cornell Seven case. The seven male students have yet to give their own assessments about what happened, surely waiting for the storm to blow over first. But amidst their silence, the general public has already come to the decisive conclusion that they are already proven guilty. And their guilt should not simply be punished by the judicial and penal system in place, but by the public collective wrath of millions commenting about the case online.

Compared to online lynching, years in prison are, in one way, actually kinder to the criminal. Years down the road, when they are released from jail, the seven men will at least be able to rebuild their lives with new jobs, as records of their being in prison would not be easily accessed by future employers not doing deep due diligence on their backgrounds. But any average Joe can type their names into a search engine (or these days, an AI chatbot) to revisit the endless online criticisms they faced for one mistake from their early 20s.

This harshness of a permanent record accessible to all is perhaps why the Chinese government has been so keen on cracking down on human flesh search these days. Beyond questioning the effectiveness of the state's judicial system and thus undermining the government's legitimacy, it is just too disruptive to the social fabric, with citizens pitting themselves against one another with dire consequences, based on the slimmest of empirical evidence. In a country so obsessed with social harmony, that sort of rumormongering will not do.

Similarly, many countries are mulling the concept of "right to forget" in cyberspace, giving people the authority to remove materials that are inaccurate, malicious, and detrimental to their well-being. Easier said than done. Asking a credible news outlet and even a large social media platform to remove a piece of information is plausible and frequently done, but if the information is interesting enough, it would be replicated and shared across hundreds of more niche and personal websites and forums, spreading to every corner of cyberspace before the original posting is taken down. 

Erasing every piece of disseminated information on the internet is nigh impossible. But accessing that information is simply too easy. The only way to prevent people from getting hurt and keep getting hurt by this asymmetry is to crack down on the vigilante justice that befell the Cornell Seven. Freedom of speech does not give the average Joe the right to dispense justice as they see fit. And no matter how terrible the crime, the punishment needs to have a limit. Without restrictions, the worst instinct of people to hunt down others becomes uncontrollable.