Keep human hands digging out online dirt

 
A local bill in Zhejiang Province has recently triggered controversy over "human flesh searches" among Chinese netizens and media. Article 39 of the drafted Regulation on Promoting Information in Zhejiang Province, which is being proposed for approval by the provincial people's congress, stipulates that no organization or individual is allowed to publish, transmit, delete or change information that individuals have disclosed online.

It's clearly an attempt to restrict human flesh searches, which are massive and cooperative research efforts using Internet media such as blogs and forums for the purpose of identifying and exposing individuals who have come to the attention of netizens, most commonly supposedly corrupt officials. The term "human flesh" indicates the pivotal role human ingenuity plays in this process, far different from traditional online searches by computer algorithms.

Human flesh searches sound horrible. But they are an inevitable outcome of online discussions of topics that everybody is interested in. It exists in many countries and regions outside of China, under different names.

The prevalence of human flesh searches is largely due to a grass-roots sense of justice and sympathy.

When an official is caught abusing an ordinary person, for instance, netizens want to expose them and find out any other dealings they have, such as children at school in the US, expensive properties, and costly cars.

However, there's definitely a problem in that such searches may mislead the public and violate some people's legal rights and interests. For instance, in 2008, a game player was severely harassed due to netizens' beliefs that he had probably had a one night stand with another man's wife.

Read more at Global Times