Puppy-throwing girl and the Internet's Power to Track and Shame

An interesting read from Chris Matyszczyk for CNet about the video of a girl in a red hoodie throwing live puppies into a river, and the video of apology (now removed) purporting to be from the same girl - following a man hunt online to identify the girl.

What's most disturbing writes Chris Matyszczyk and I agree:

People online have so much power in threatening the lives of those who might be guilty--or just might not be. The Web makes it so easy to accuse and so hard to retract. And the definition of a crime becomes "anything of which I don't approve."

This post on Reddit (NSFW), for example, asks people to think about that power. It offers that "Internet lynch mob s***" can harness an extreme negative force, one that might be entirely misplaced.

What's the chance now of Puschnik (who is reported to live in Germany) or--if it isn't, in fact, her--the real perpetrator, suffering physical harm because a resourceful group on the Web has tracked her down?

The parallel with the lady who threw a cat in the bin happened just recently, but this reminds of the story in 2005 of a young woman who refused to clean up the mess after her dog pooped on the floor of a subway in South Korea. Someone on the train took a video on their camera phone and posted it on the Internet which started a nationwide witchhunt.

Within hours, she was labeled gae-ttong-nyue (dog-shit-girl) and her pictures and parodies were everywhere. Humiliated in public and indelibly marked, the woman reportedly quit her university.

According to The Washington Post which reported on the subject at the time: the case was “a remarkable show of Internet force and a peek into an unsettling corner of the future.”

emily | 9:14 AM | Citizens as Camera Phone Reporters |
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