I get it: People are scared. People want vengeance. But
these websites asking people to "Identify the Looter!" make me incredibly uncomfortable. I'm trying to flesh out the reasons for my discomfort, and among other things, found myself referencing Daniel Solove's
The Future of Reputation:
"In medieval towns and villages, long before the dawn of police, justice would be carried out by posses. Victims would raise the hue and cry, and posses would hunt down the suspected offender and carry out punishment on the spot... We've come a long way from those days. But Internet shaming resurrects dimensions of the posse."
Solove goes on to discuss one fundamental problem of websites like these -- there is a total lack of due process.
"It is tempting to shame, especially when we are convinced that we have seen something blameworthy. But what if we're wrong? What if we don't know the whole story? We have developed procedures in the law to protect against such errors.No such procedures exist in the world of shaming."
It is exactly that: we don't know who these people are. We don't know where they are, or why they're there. It's possible that some of them are just spectators. But by posting their pictures online, they're being instantly labelled as something that they may not be, and that misinformation can spread both quickly and irreparably.
