[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] What does the human flesh engine say about us?

[rfmcdonald]

The human flesh search engine has claimed a victim, this time within the law.

Mary Bale, a 45-year-old bank worker, was fined 250 pounds (US$400) after pleading guilty at Coventry Magistrates’ Court in central England.

Bale, who appeared close to tears during the hearing, was also ordered to pay costs of 1,171 pounds and banned from keeping or owning animals for the next five years.

[. . .]

Bale received death threats in August after closed-circuit television camera footage emerged of her stroking the four-year-old tabby before picking it up by the scruff of its neck and dropping it into the bin.

The video was posted on video sharing site You Tube and a Facebook campaign attracted tens of thousands of followers.

District judge Caroline Goulborn told Bale that while her actions could have caused substantial harm to the cat, in reality it had not been hurt.

She said: “The media interest in this case has resulted in you being vilified in some quarters and I have taken that into account.”

What's the human flesh search engine? It's a term, taken from China but applicable worldwide, describing the mass collaboration of Internet users to hunt down and punish malefactors.

The name refers both to the use of knowledge contributed by human beings through social networking, as well as the fact that the searches are usually dedicated to finding the identity of a human being who has committed some sort of offense or social breach online.[3] People conducting such research are commonly referred to collectively as "Human Flesh Search Engines".

Because of the convenient and efficient nature of information sharing on the cyberspace, the Human Flesh Search is often used to acquire information usually difficult or impossible to find by other conventional means (such as a library or Google). Such information, once available, can be rapidly distributed to hundreds of websites, making it an extremely powerful mass media. The purposes of human flesh search vary from providing technical/professional Q&A support, to revealing private/classified information about specific individuals or organizations (therefore breaching the internet confidentiality and anonymity). Because personal knowledge or unofficial (sometimes illegal) access are frequently depended upon to acquire these information, the reliability and accuracy of such searches often vary.

Earlier this year, the New York Times had an article examining the phenomenon in China, starting with a "crush" video featuring a woman somewhere in China who stomped a kitten to death with her high-heeled shows. Vengeance--justice?--was swift.

There is no portal specially designed for human-flesh searching; the practice takes place in Chinese Internet forums like Mop, where the term most likely originated. Searches are powered by users called wang min, Internet citizens, or Netizens. The word “Netizen” exists in English, but you hear its equivalent used much more frequently in China, perhaps because the public space of the Internet is one of the few places where people can in fact act like citizens. A Netizen called Beacon Bridge No Return found the first clue in the kitten-killer case. “There was credit information before the crush scene reading ‘www.crushworld.net,’ ” that user wrote. Netizens traced the e-mail address associated with the site to a server in Hangzhou, a couple of hours from Shanghai. A follow-up post asked about the video’s location: “Are users from Hangzhou familiar with this place?” Locals reported that nothing in their city resembled the backdrop in the video. But Netizens kept sifting through the clues, confident they could track down one person in a nation of more than a billion. They were right.

The traditional media picked up the story, and people all across China saw the kitten killer’s photo on television and in newspapers. “I know this woman,” wrote I’m Not Desert Angel four days after the search began. “She’s not in Hangzhou. She lives in the small town I live in here in northeastern China. God, she’s a nurse! That’s all I can say.”

Only six days after the first Mop post about the video, the kitten killer’s home was revealed as the town of Luobei in Heilongjiang Province, in the far northeast, and her name — Wang Jiao — was made public, as were her phone number and her employer. Wang Jiao and the cameraman who filmed her were dismissed from what the Chinese call iron rice bowls, government jobs that usually last to retirement and pay a pension until death.

“Wang Jiao was affected a lot,” a Luobei resident known online as Longjiangbaby told me by e-mail. “She left town and went somewhere else. Li Yuejun, the cameraman, used to be core staff of the local press. He left Luobei, too.” The kitten-killer case didn’t just provide revenge; it helped turn the human-flesh search engine into a national phenomenon.

It's not just China. Consider the aftermath of the suicide of Megan Meier, a Missouri adolescent who killed herself after the mother of a frenemy set up a MySpace account used to taught her. Suffice it to say that, once identified, her parents lost their jobs, the family was driven from town, and the mother prosecuted (unsuccessfully) on charges of creating a false account.

What do I think of this? I have to admit that my first impression is approval, driven by my personal experiences and inclinations. The idea of cat cruelty appals me, and my experience with depression is such that I've no tolerance for people who exploit depression in others. Then again, mob justice is never good. Worse, as the New York Times article notes, it's also the tactic of the weak an marginalized.

Rebecca MacKinnon, a visiting fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy, argues that China’s central government may actually be happy about searches that focus on localized corruption. “The idea that you manage the local bureaucracy by sicking the masses on them is actually not a democratic tradition but a Maoist tradition,” she told me. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao encouraged citizens to rise up against local officials who were bourgeois or corrupt, and human-flesh searches have been tagged by some as Red Guard 2.0. It’s easy to denounce the tyranny of the online masses when you live in a country that has strong rule of law and institutions that address public corruption, but in China the human-flesh search engine is one of the only ways that ordinary citizens can try to go after corrupt local officials. Cases like the Lin Jiaxiang search, as imperfect as their outcomes may be, are examples of the human-flesh search as a potential mechanism for checking government excess.

The human-flesh search engine can also serve as a safety valve in a society with ever mounting pressures on the government. “You can’t stop the anger, can’t make everyone shut up, can’t stop the Internet, so you try and channel it as best you can. You try and manage it, kind of like a waterworks hydroelectric project,” MacKinnon explained. “It’s a great way to divert the qi, the anger, to places where it’s the least damaging to the central government’s legitimacy.”

Of course we're stuck with it. Still.