Crowd-sourcing justice: tracking a decade’s news coverage of cyber vigilantism throughout the Greater China region

ABSTRACT

Examining how a newly emerged communication practice has been presented in press reports over time could help delineate the evolvement that the public perception of the practice has undergone. This study analyses how press coverage in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan framed the practice of cyber vigilantism ‒ defined as a mediated search whereby people use digital media to look for and publicize private information about some individuals ‒ over a decade span. We found that despite its controversies, the practice has been greeted with great enthusiasm since 2006. The public responses tended to become conservative in recent years. The news coverage in China provided more rigorous discussion about cyber vigilantism and contained a greater mix of optimistic and critical responses than that in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Implications of these findings are discussed in details.

KEYWORDS:

• Cyber vigilantism
• social media
• news coverage
• content analysis
• framing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Stella C. Chia (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin at Madison) is an associate professor in the Department of Media and Communication at City University of Hong Kong [email: [email protected]].

Notes

1 Chang and Leung (2015) considered the first suspected case of cyber vigilantism in China was the case of ‘Poison’ occurred in 2006. However, other studies considered the kitten-killer case as the first one (Downey, 2010; Wang et al., 2010).

2 We found 117 sampled stories in China were published by the national news agency, China News Service, which provides news stories to news media subscribers rather than to the general public.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by a grant from City University of Hong Kong [SRG#7004833].