From fraudulent publication to dating background checks, Detective Tiktok is thriving
In the case of Byron, the infamous Coldplay concert, there are multiple articles speculating about his family, “Who is his wife?” 404 As a media I’m writingthe incident is “a symbol of current private surveillance and social media hellish situation,” and Tiktok commenters use facial recognition tools to identify random people online.
“I think embarrassment is an extension of the algorithmic flow to extremism,” Cohen says. “The Internet normalizes content while it’s going on. That means the extremes have to continue to be even more extreme. We are living an era of lawlessness and true criminal investigation and shame that is amateur, vigilante justice, but seemingly justice.”
Written on Reddit in 2023, User Electronic_Gur_843 I sought advice After being “publicly blown up on the internet” for “mistakes.”
“It was a traumatic experience that led me to be demolished by hundreds of thousands of people, and while it was a mistake, it was blown away disproportionately.
They say their Google results are raising “article pages” about them, and the overall experience left them “acutely depressed.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US, 17% of adolescents are in cyber-disruption, and as of 2023, 9.5% of adolescents have had serious suicide attempts.
“The purpose of public shame is to hold people accountable for behavior that operates outside of social norms or is considered aggressive,” says Fox Hamilton. But this mentality means that if something bad happens to someone, you’re more likely to be held liable for the victim, such as cheating online or sending a message to a stranger.
Ironically, Fox Hamilton says, “People who have that belief in a fair world are often more likely to be embarrassed or jumped over the bandwagon with things like this because they think, ‘You did something bad, it’s your fault, and I’m not responsible for the bad things that happen here.’
There are also slippery slopes when starting people’s police according to our own morals and assumptions. In response to the Cold Play Concert scandal, right-wing influencer Matt Walsh wrote to X: It’s not hard to imagine how that logic could be used to apply it to women trapped in abusive marriages or to people who have not subscribed to monogamy.
If the target is a public figure, like a CEO, the viewer can feel that it is even more justified in the attack.
“At this point, there are so many problems around the world with big tech companies, and I think some people express it in a symbolic way,” says Fox Hamilton.
Whether they are posting videos of reopening cases or posting active surveillance, the PI interviewed by Wired says they are careful to blur their faces and are cautious about identifiable landmarks to protect both the accused and the accused. In Stephanie’s case, she sometimes goes a step further and recreates the case in the video. This is a step taken to check the confidentiality of the client. Clients and client partners are not docked online.
Allenstel agrees that the public can overdo things.
“What started out with people being accountable has turned into a sport of public humiliation,” she says. “It’s reckless. The internet is not a courtroom, and random users are not investigators.”