Gender digilantism and bystanders: networked cyber intimate partner violence in Hong Kong

Abstract

This study uses the concept of gender digilantism to examine the roles of bystanders in cyber intimate partner violence (IPV). Gender digilantism is defined as “the leverage of information and communication technologies by netizens to police perceived transgression of gender and sexual norms.” It is a form of informal justice-seeking in which netizens take extrajudicial actions against a wide array of social infractions. Extant research documents how informal justice-seeking in cyberspace has empowered victim-survivors of gender-based violence; however, its repressive potential in reproducing gender biases and misogyny through gender digilantism has been less studied. This study contributes to the literature using online ethnography to examine a real-life example of cyber IPV in Hong Kong. It shows how informal justice-seeking legitimizes bystander involvement in cyber IPV. Moreover, it transforms cyber IPV from primarily dyadic violence involving intimate partners to networked violence involving anonymous netizens from different online platforms who co-perpetrate violence.

Keywords:

• Gender digilantism
• informal (in)justice-seeking
• networked violence
• cyber intimate partner violence
• Asian society

Introduction

Gender digilantism, defined as the leverage of information and communication technologies (ICTs) by netizens to police perceived transgression of gender and sexual norms, is a form of informal justice-seeking. On the one hand, the growing legitimacy of informal justice-seeking in cyberspace has empowered women victim-survivors of gender-based violence and elicited global support to condemn violence against women (Powell, 2015a, 2015b). On the other hand, it has justified networked harassment on social media, in which a member of a social network accuses a member of norm violation, thus triggering moral outrage and resulting in other network members sending harassing messages to the accused (Marwick, 2021). This duality of informal justice-seeking requires more in-depth research. Using online ethnography, this study illustrates how gender digilantism transformed an incident of cyber intimate partner violence (IPV) in Hong Kong from primarily dyadic violence involving intimate partners into high-profile networked violence involving anonymous netizens. We believe that cyber IPV in a non-Western context provides a valuable case for the examination of the complex relationship between informal justice-seeking, gender, and intimate relationships.

The advent of technology has facilitated the creation of new platforms for people to develop new intimate relationships, as in the case of dating apps (Chan, 2021), to strengthen existing relationships (Murray & Campbell, 2015), and to maintain long-distance relationships (Hassenzahl et al., 2012). These platforms have blurred the boundary between the private and public domains: individuals create online posts to mark relationship milestones, such as engagements and weddings, or record daily intimate interactions in cyberspace (Ford, 2011). At the same time, intimate partners in conflict have taken relationship disputes online. For example, some people utilize cyberspace to publicly shame their partners, disclose details of their intimate relationships, or even fabricate stories to induce a “moral panic” (Cohen, 2004; Powell et al., 2018, pp. 138–163), thereby subjecting their intimate partners to “trial by social media” (Milivojevic & McGovern, 2014). By so doing, they mobilize anonymous netizens to co-perpetrate cyber IPV.

Cyber IPV refers to the use of ICT to inflict harm on an intimate partner through means such as doxxing, dissemination of intimate images/messages/videos without consent (e.g., in “revenge porn”), cyberstalking, public shaming, intimidation, and controlling a partner’s access to ICT or monitoring the contents of social media (Taylor & Xia, 2018). To date, cyber IPV has been mainly conceptualized as a form of dyadic violence involving the perpetrator and their intimate partner (Marganski & Melander, 2018), and scholars have rarely addressed the involvement of bystanders in the virtual community in co-perpetrating violence. In this study, conducting over one year of online ethnography, we illustrate how gender digilantism prompted the involvement of different types of bystanders in multiple ways in a high-profile cyber IPV case. The case involved a husband accusing his wife of committing adultery and mobilizing netizens to take online and offline actions against her and her alleged lover.

We develop the concept of networked cyber IPV to capture the characteristics of this specific form of cyber IPV. Networked cyber IPV is violence involving multiple parties from multiple platforms of cyberspace, encompassing online and possibly offline actions. It echoes the concept of networked harassment developed by Marwick (2021). We concur with Marwick that netizens’ participation in networked violence is often motivated by moral outrage. We further delineate how gender digilantism and informal justice-seeking online have legitimized networked cyber IPV and allowed it to gain traction.

The contribution of this study is threefold. First, we delineate the complex relationships between digilantism, informal justice-seeking, gender, and intimate relationships. Second, using a real-life example in Hong Kong, we add to the literature that has so far focused on Western contexts. Finally, we critically reflect on the roles of bystanders in IPV, which have so far been conceived in terms of violence intervention and control.

Analytical framework

ICT has transformed the public sphere, with citizens increasingly using it to initiate bottom-up participation that either contributes to socio-political progress (Castells, 2015) or reinforces structures of inequality (Levmore & Nussbaum, 2010). This duality is best captured by the practice of digilantism, or digital vigilantism, whereby netizens utilize ICT to “take the law and justice into their own hands” without adhering to participative ideals or the due process in the formal criminal justice system (Loveluck, 2020; Powell et al., 2018, pp. 138–163). Digilantism has its origin in vigilantism, which refers to the collective use of extra-legal violence, or the threat of it, in response to an alleged social infraction (Powell et al., 2018, pp. 138–163). Social infractions range from trivial violations of social protocol to highly contested behaviors—for instance, “manspreading” (Loveluck, 2020) and having extra-marital affairs—to criminal acts, such as terrorism and rioting (Trottier, 2017). Digilantism, as an informal practice of policing and justice-seeking, is associated with weaponizing the social visibility of the offender by strategies such as naming and shaming as well as doxxing (Loveluck, 2020).

Research on digilantism as informal justice-seeking has illustrated its liberatory potential in empowering women. For example, Herman (2005) argues that the formal criminal justice system fails to accommodate the wishes and needs of victims of sexual and gender-based violence, as legal processes often function in ways that challenge victims’ credibility and undermine their sense of power and control. Victim-survivors of sexual and gender-based violence thus seek to be socially recognized outside the formal criminal justice system. They domesticate ICT for self-empowerment. Powell (2015a) describes how ICT has been employed by anti-rape activists to fight against the rape culture. Victim-survivors of rape utilize mainstream social media to “out” their rapists as a result of their frustration with the formal criminal justice system (Powell, 2015a). Victim-survivors may also opt to post testimonials on social media to seek recognition without necessarily identifying the rapist (Powell, 2015a). The #MeToo movement is another example of “soft vigilantism,” which constantly challenges the public discourse that sexual and gender-based violence is taboo and shameful. In China, “human flesh search” (renrou sousuo), meaning the doxxing of alleged social deviants using search engines, has been widely deployed by netizens to identify corrupt government officials, including those who are allegedly involved in sexual violence (Cheong & Gong, 2010). On the one hand, victim-survivors and netizens use the extensive information in cyberspace to identify the perpetrator of sexual violence; on the other, they exploit the affordance of ICT to connect to a globally networked audience and draw public attention, thereby making discernible social impacts and giving recognition to victim-survivors (Fileborn, 2016).

While recognizing the liberatory potential of the collective use of ICT in fighting sexual and gender-based violence, researchers have been cognizant that ICT can be misused by collectives, or “digilantes,” to reinforce gender inequality. For example, Powell (2015b) documents how a victim of rape in Ohio was bullied by the schoolmates of the rapists through posting misogynistic tweets and expressing sympathy for the rapists, although the police used ICT to help solicit the evidence to achieve rape justice in the formal criminal justice system. In sum, digilantism as a form of networked activism and informal justice-seeking can have problematic consequences for gender relations, an issue we will address in this study by investigating the roles of bystanders in cyber IPV.

Literature review: Cyber, IPV and the roles of bystanders

Cyber IPV could occur among dating, cohabitating, and married partners and is thus referred to as “digital dating abuse” (Weathers & Hopson, 2015) or “partner violence in cyberspace” (Melander, 2010). It takes multiple forms, with some forms such as non-consensual pornography perpetrated by a former or current partner (Citron & Franks, 2014; Eaton et al., 2021; Powell & Henry, 2017) receiving more attention than others. Bennett et al. (2011) identified four categories of cyber IPV: hostility (e.g., direct threats), intrusiveness (e.g., monitoring), humiliation (e.g., insulting posts), and exclusion (e.g., blocking communication).

Research on cyber IPV is relatively recent, with most studies published in the past 10 years and concerning primarily North America and Europe (Taylor & Xia, 2018). Quantitative studies have revealed that the prevalence rates of cyber IPV victimization against women reported by scholars varied between less than 1% to 78% owing to different research designs employed and the various relationship contexts concerned (Fernet et al., 2019). Qualitative research has illustrated how ICT is used to perpetuate or fight against IPV in cyberspace (Clevenger & Gilliam, 2020; Powell & Henry, 2017; Southworth et al., 2007). For example, intimate partners may use ICT to exert power and control over their victims to an unprecedented degree, given that technology such as mobile phones and global positioning systems (GPS) are now an integral part of everyday lives in the metropole (Brown et al., 2018; Lee & Anderson, 2016). In contrast, victim-survivors have used ICT to combat (cyber) IPV, and governments have explored the possibility of using ICT to provide support to victim-survivors of IPV (Tarzia et al., 2017).

However, both quantitative and qualitative research on cyber IPV to date has continued to conceptualize cyber IPV as a form of dyadic violence and adopted the same understanding of the roles of bystanders in the offline IPV literature. In this literature, scholars have focused on the potential positive roles of bystanders in intervening and controlling violence. Weitzman et al. (2020), for example, identify six types of bystander intervention in offline IPV: (1) offering a haven, (2) offering sympathy, (3) asking the abuser to stop, (4) providing physical support, (5) reporting to authorities, and (6) telling an adult. The interchangeability between the notions of “bystander intervention” and “informal social control” (see Emery et al., 2020; Lazarus & Signal, 2013) further illustrates the positive assumption regarding bystanders’ roles in preventing and intervening in offline IPV in the literature. Although such an assumption facilitates the examination of factors that may increase the likelihood of bystanders intervening in episodes of offline IPV (e.g., Emery et al., 2020; Lazarus & Signal, 2013; Pagliaro et al., 2020), it is insufficient in reflecting the range of possible bystander reactions in episodes of cyber IPV. Rather than intervening to stop the abuser and offer support to the victim, bystanders may blame the victim and directly participate in co-perpetrating violence, such as taking the side of the perpetrator and harassing the victim.

Aggressors exploit the connectivity, anonymity, and networked disembeddedness of the cyber world, as well as the public nature of cyber forums, to perpetrate IPV, such as in the form of public shaming. As Baym (2010) suggests, the connections not only between those who are already in a relationship but also between strangers may be intensified in the digital age. Powell et al. (2018, pp. 112–137) illustrate that hate becomes contagious through networks in cyberspace. Racism and misogyny are thus said to be networked in the network society, which then yield “real” consequences—hate crimes. In addition, anonymity and networked disembeddedness in cyberspace reduce the social costs of online aggression (Moore et al., 2012) and may embolden bystanders to inflict harm on victims of IPV. This contrasts with episodes of offline IPV, wherein bystanders’ actions are relatively benign, given the constraints associated with identifiability, accountability, and their connections with the perpetrators and/or victims of IPV.

We thereby contend that cyber IPV cannot be conceptualized, as with its offline counterpart, as a form of dyadic violence, and a new framework to capture the possible positive and negative roles of bystanders needs to be developed. Although Pina et al. (2017) acknowledge the facilitating role of bystanders in non-consensual pornography, bystander participation in cyber IPV has thus far been under-researched. This study aims to contribute to the literature by examining how digilantism as informal justice-seeking has legitimized bystander involvement in cyber IPV and how virtual connectivity, anonymity, and network disembeddedness have facilitated bystanders to co-perpetrate violence.

Research method

Ethnography is meant to yield “thick descriptions” (Geertz, 1973, p. 6), and “moving ethnography online” (Schrooten, 2012) has become crucial to social science research in grasping the increasingly digitalized and dematerialized social reality (Hine, 2015). Ethnographic research rarely claims numerical generalization. Instead, it aims to develop theoretically relevant concepts that might resonate in different contexts based on an in-depth analysis of usually rich and thick data of a phenomenon. The present study adopts a “connective” approach to online ethnography (Hine, 2017; Rufas & Hine, 2018). It views cyberspace not as a discrete entity but as interconnected with other cyber and offline spaces. As will be detailed in the following sections, the present study, focusing mainly on the LIHKG forum (a popular cyber Reddit-like forum used by university students/graduates in Hong Kong), seeks to trace the development of networked cyber IPV in the virtual world by exploring how information circulates across different cyber and offline sites and how different actors, including the perpetrator, the victims and their close others, and bystanders, who were either cyber key opinion leaders (KOLs) or anonymous netizens, interact with one another throughout the incident.

In addition to data from LIHKG, we collected data from four other public online platforms where the incident was discussed. We did so as silent observers. These other platforms included public Facebook pages, where online KOLs and netizens expressed their support for the husband; Instagram, where the younger sister of the alleged lover of the accused wife was harassed for her brother’s alleged wrongdoing; and Hong Kong Discuss and Baby Kingdom, two public online forums where netizens shared related posts and discussed and commented on the accusations against the wife. We also visited the websites of the organizations where the accused wife and her alleged lover worked and examined the comments netizens left on their pages. In addition, we analyzed how several online media sites reported the incident as “news.”

Our examination of these online platforms allowed us to investigate how different groups of netizens were involved in the incident. The multiplicity of the actors involved across a wide range of online platforms illustrates the networked nature of some forms of cyber IPV. In total, we collected and analyzed 1,681 pages of online discussions, which involved 41,000 comments. We did not include comments with standard templates, such as those with the title “push [the post] until the whore dies” (on LIHKG), to reduce the chances of analyzing comments posted by hired users (Wang et al., 2014).

We also did not include material that was not publicly accessible. For instance, on LIHKG, members can opt for encryption when posting their comments so that they can only be viewed by other members but not by non-members of the online forum. The present study does not include these encrypted comments. To protect the identity of the people involved in the case we analyzed, we only referred to their broad occupational categories and translated all direct quotes from Chinese to English so that they could not be traced by search engines. We conducted online ethnography over a one-year period from August 2021 (the day the post that was used to publicly shame the wife for allegedly having an extra-marital affair appeared on LIHKG) to July 2022 to keep track of the activities of the key actors and identify the (gendered) impacts of the incident.

Research site

Hong Kong provides a valuable site to examine the complex relationship between gender digilantism, informal justice-seeking, and cyber IPV. Analyzing the press coverage of digilantism in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan between 2006 and 2015, Chia (2019) shows that the practice has been “greeted with fervent enthusiasm” in these three societies and is generally regarded as a “rightful act of citizenship that can effectively reinforce social norms and state laws” (p. 2059). Scholarly concerns about the negative impacts of digilantism in the form of invading privacy and wronging the innocent have, however, received little media attention. A study conducted in 2014 showed that young cyber vigilantes in Hong Kong generally perceived the formal justice system as ineffective and had a high level of perceived control in cyberspace; they believed that digilantism will achieve social justice (Chang & Poon, 2017). Digilantism also played a significant role in the anti-extradition bill movement in Hong Kong between 2019 and 2020 (Li & Whitworth, 2023). Cheung (2021) argues that issues of public interest should be considered when addressing digilantism, as it signifies a loss of public “confidence in the ruling authority and a yearning for an alternative form of justice” (p. 577).

A recent study on digilantism in mainland China, in contrast, raised concerns about the practice of digilantism being mobilized to achieve “misogynist and populist nationalism” (Huang, 2023). Huang (2023) shows how, instead of achieving social justice, netizens in China named and shamed Chinese female intellectuals on Chinese social media platforms for their alleged unpatriotic behaviors. These women were framed as “ungrateful traitors” and “ugly sluts” who simultaneously betrayed their country and gender (pp. 6–8). Huang’s insights are particularly relevant to this study because of the rampant misogyny on LIHKG.

LIHKG has emerged as a forum that has predominantly young, university-educated, and pro-democracy movement users. It has vowed to enshrine freedom of speech and protect the privacy of users’ personal information against increasing political censorship. Scholars, however, identified three notable characteristics among the users of the forum: (1) the culture of doxxing (Purbrick, 2019); (2) the culture of sexism and misogyny (Yam, 2021), as exemplified in the prevalent yet often unchallenged notions such as “all women are chicken” (the term chicken being a Cantonese slang denoting prostitutes) and “women use their pussies as ATMs (automated teller machines, as a metaphor implying that women exchange sex for money); and (3) the use of LIHKG as a site for informal justice-seeking (Li & Whitworth, 2023). As LIHKG was the first platform on which the incident of cyber IPV that this study analyzes occurred, it is pertinent to linking gender digilantism with cyber IPV.

Previous research on IPV in Hong Kong has focused on violence committed offline (Chan, 2021; Cheung et al., 2022). To our knowledge, no research has been conducted to examine cyber IPV. Available statistics on IPV are about IPV committed offline. Statistics published by Hong Kong’s Social Welfare Department suggest that women are more susceptible to IPV than men, with 85.0% (n = 2,307) of the reported cases (n = 2,715) in 2021 being male-to-female abuse and in the forms of physical violence, sexual violence, psychological abuse, or multiple violence (HKSAR Government, 2021). Furthermore, 58.3% (n = 1582) of the reported cases were husband-to-wife abuse. Given the scarcity of research on cyber IPV in Hong Kong, our in-depth case analysis aims to provide some initial insights into its dynamics. We focus on how gender digilantism and informal justice-seeking have transformed bystanders into co-perpetrators of IPV, thus turning it from dyadic violence to networked violence.

Findings

Unpacking the dynamics of networked cyber IPV

The incident of cyber IPV documented in this study started with a male blogger and his “friend” creating posts to publicly shame the blogger’s wife and her alleged lover for supposedly committing adultery. They retaliated against the alleged adultery by posting nearly every detail of the conversations between the blogger and his wife and between the wife and her supposed lover without their consent. In August 2021, a post titled “With Loads of Pictures: Two [their occupational titles] Having Affair, ‘A Male Dog’ Seducing Someone Else’s Wife” went viral on LIHKG. In the post, the author disclosed the names of the accused wife, her alleged lover, and the organizations where they worked, arguing that they had violated their professional codes of conduct and were unfit for their jobs. The author also publicly pressurized the organizations where the accused wife and her alleged lover worked to punish them.

Using words such as “cheating” and dehumanizing the alleged lover as a “dog,” the author of the post called attention to the transgression of marital sexual morals. The post aimed to not only publicly name and shame the alleged moral transgressors but also, more importantly, garner sympathy from anonymous netizens and mobilize them to take actions to inflict online and offline harm on the alleged transgressors, specifically resulting in their social isolation and job loss.

Five minutes after this post was uploaded, an online blogger named X changed his profile picture on Facebook into full black and added the following caption:

I can’t endure such harm

[Number] years of happiness are nothing but her lies

I don’t want to let you go

[But] it’s time to say goodbye, my wife

Given the timely coincidence, readers of the LIHKG post were quick to identify the “victim”—the husband who had supposedly been betrayed—to be X. Within just an hour, the original LIHKG post received 1,001 replies, its maximum number of replies, as well as more than 5,000 upvotes, which was in stark contrast to fewer than a hundred downvotes.

Soon after X changed his profile picture on Facebook, some online KOLs also created posts on their social media showing support for X by emphasizing his good character while attributing the failure of his marriage to the supposed infidelity of his wife. One online KOL wrote on Facebook:

He is badly hurt. […] X is my good friend. We have known each other for ten years. I am a bad-tempered person, but I got along with him very well when I worked with him. A few years ago, […] he decided to become a full-time [occupation]. Back then, his girlfriend didn’t despise him and was the most supportive girlfriend on earth. […] The ending is indeed flabbergasting. […] [number] years [of relationship], how unimaginable.

This post served to testify to the good moral character of X (e.g., I got along with him very well) and increase the credibility of the hurt he supposedly suffered because of his wife’s alleged adultery. Trusting the judgement of the online KOL who apparently supported the husband and took his side, some netizens felt assured of the certainty of the moral rights and wrongs of the incident. They started using inflammatory language to condemn X’s wife. They commented that she was “a cunt” who dared to cheat on X after being “married for less than a year!” (comment on LIHKG).

Netizens were not content with limiting their actions to the virtual space. Enraged at the accused wife and her alleged lover’s supposed moral violation, netizens, especially those on LIHKG, drafted and sent letters of complaint, demanding their employers investigate their professional ethics; some doxxed the accused and their family and friends. For example, some netizens disclosed the online profiles of the alleged lover’s younger sister. Others doxxed the accused wife’s female colleague, who was accused of helping her to conceal her supposed affair. Other netizens judged the physical appearance of the accused wife and her colleague. They even put an image of her face on a porn cover. Some sent harassing messages to the younger sister of the alleged lover. The netizens also made harassing calls to the accused wife and her alleged lover, forcing them to turn off their phones and change their phone numbers.

With LIHKG being one of the top 10 most popular online sites in Hong Kong (SimilarWeb, n.d.), discussions on the platform are often perceived by online news media as newsworthy and are widely reported. Local news media soon joined the chorus in discrediting X’s wife and her supposed lover by reporting rumors and online discussions of the issue. These news reports served as summaries for “latecomers”—such as users of pro-government online forums—to make sense of the incident. An example would be the news report by HK01, the largest (in terms of number of staff) digital-first professional-oriented news media in Hong Kong. The report emphasized in the first few lines the contributions, if not sacrifices, X had made to his marriage; it then turned to the comments by netizens who initially showed one-sided support for him:

[…] He [X] sometimes shared his intimate life with his wife on his Facebook page. On his birthday in March this year, he announced that he would marry his girlfriend, whom he has been dating for [number] years. In April, he created a post and shared a photo showing that he had purchased an apartment for his wife [emphasis added], which made his readers envious of her. But the fairy tale soon vanished in just half a year. […] Readers were worried about X and started to leave comments showing support for him on Facebook. […] Ironically, […] the introduction to one of his short stories writes, “[…] a life-long commitment becomes a fiction, and the one you love most becomes a liar.” What an omen!

The report by HK01 helped to disseminate the accusation from LIHKG to a larger audience, including netizens on Hong Kong Discuss, an online forum of mainly pro-establishment leaning participants. Upon reading the report by HK01, netizens on Hong Kong Discuss went on to discredit the accused wife and even Hong Kong women in general:

“Brothers are like hands and feet; wives are like angels!”

What’s so extraordinary about “cockroaches”¹ sharing “angels”?

Maybe his wife is a full-time “angel”!

I’ve already told you all to get a wife from mainland China! “[Hong] Kong Girls” are simply unreliable—but Taiwanese girls are even worse!

Hong Kong women no longer conform to wifehood these days…

The term “angels” was used by conservative-leaning netizens in pro-government online forums to discredit Hong Kong women who participated in pro-democracy social movements by alleging that they provided sexual services to male protesters. In other words, these netizens based their condemnation of X’s wife on gender stereotypes against women in general and Hong Kong women with political views different from them in particular—either their alleged inferior moral character compared with mainland Chinese women or essential sexual promiscuity.

Similar discussions appeared on Baby Kingdom, a forum mainly used by local parents, and the accusation soon reached the parents whose sons and daughters studied in the organizations where the accused wife and her alleged lover worked. These parents reacted by adding the accused wife to a WhatsApp group and demeaning her as a “chicken” (a Cantonese slang referring to female prostitutes) and a slut. Eventually, the accused wife and her alleged lover lost their jobs and were socially dismissed for violating professional ethics.

During this incident, a few netizens on LIHKG questioned the validity of the accusations. These netizens investigated the Facebook and Instagram posts of X and identified evidence of him cheating on his wife. A netizen also found evidence about X verbally and emotionally abusing his wife for more than six years and publicly shaming her by calling her a bitch. However, this post received only around 1,700 upvotes and 350 downvotes. Thereafter, five additional posts provided counterevidence to X’s accusation. This number was small when compared with the over 30 follow-up posts supporting X and accusing his wife in addition to the side discussions that aimed at trolling, shaming, and blaming her. In other words, the posts providing counterevidence to the accusations did not get as much attention as the content created by those supporting X.

In response to the follow-up posts supporting or challenging him, X created a Facebook post dismissing those who questioned the validity of his accusations as “organized attacks.” He claimed that his wife and her alleged lover were trying to make both sides suffer. X’s appeal to the affective dimension of the incident, such as through disclosing the negative impacts of his marital breakdown on his work, evoked sympathy from netizens. Although it is unclear whether X was the person who created the initial post that exposed his wife’s private conversations, personal details, and photos without her consent, his open accusation that his wife made him suffer and his resort to public emotional calls for support emboldened netizens to take retaliatory actions against his wife and her alleged lover for their alleged moral violation. This incident illustrates how perpetrators of cyber IPV could mobilize anonymous netizens as bystanders to co-perpetrate IPV.

From informal justice-seeking to injustice production

In this section, we illustrate four aspects of this incident of gender digilantism: (1) its moral framing, (2) its gender dynamic, (3) its networked characteristic, and (4) how it produces injustice. Two moral frames were used to mobilize netizens to act against the accused. The accused wife and her alleged lover were framed as (a) transgressors of marital moral codes and (b) violators of professional ethics. Ordinary netizens took part in networked IPV, as the accounts by KOLs and HK01 lent credence to a particular “version” of the incident. This version constructed the husband as a loving (evidenced by his regular sharing of romantic moments on his social media accounts), committed (illustrated by his marriage proposal after many years of dating), and dedicated (reflected in his purchase of an apartment for his wife) husband who was betrayed and hurt by his disloyal wife. In contrast, they portrayed the accused wife and her alleged lover as violators of marital moral codes, as evidenced by their alleged affairs. The digilantes also condemned the accused wife and her alleged lovers for violating their professional ethics and argued that their alleged marital affairs had made them unfit to continue their profession. The moral outrage against transgressions of marital moral codes may not justify informal justice-seeking, as marital affairs are generally considered a private issue in Hong Kong. However, the violation of professional ethics is seen as an issue of public interest and helps justify collective mobilization and intervention, including offline actions to demand employers to dismiss the accused.

Turning to the gender dynamic, the accused wife was called “chicken” (chau3 gai1), “slut” (yam4 wa1), “bitch” (baat3 po4), and “angels” (tin1 si3). The discourse of “ugly slut” is commonly used to attack women in digilantism (Huang, 2023). These derogatory terms highlight how gender norms concerning female sexuality and sexual morals formed the basis upon which the wife-victim was judged and condemned. In addition to the wife, two other women—a colleague of the wife and the sister of the wife’s alleged lover—were named and shamed for their physical appearances and were sexually harassed by netizens because of the incident. In contrast, no male relatives or close friends of the wife and her alleged lover were called out and shamed by netizens. The alleged lover was named and shamed by having his personal information disclosed, by being called a “male dog,” and via doxxing and harassment. However, most netizens paid no attention to his physical appearance. This illustrates how women and their bodies may become easy targets of digilantism and how the shaming often takes on a distinctively gendered edge.

With respect to the networked characteristic, the participation of netizens in this incident of cyber IPV changed IPV from dyadic violence to networked violence from three perspectives. First, different groups of people played different roles in co-perpetrating violence. KOLs as online celebrities used their popularity to garner trust from netizens that their account was credible. Enraged ordinary netizens took online and offline actions against the accused. Journalists spread, through news reports, the accusation to a larger audience, including interested parties. Parents used their status as interested parties to harass the accused and pressured their work organization to dismiss them based on accusations of violations of professional ethics. Second, the incident of cyber IPV involved a network of virtual groups spanning different online platforms and social media across the political spectrum (pro-democracy movements and pro-government) and patronages (e.g., parents and young people). Third, violence was networked because online moral condemnation was linked to offline actions that caused harm beyond the virtual space.

Instead of seeking informal justice, this incident very likely has produced injustice. Two days after the fervent enthusiasm netizens showed to support X and condemn his wife, some netizens started to question the validity of the allegations and whether the post was part of an organized attack on X’s wife, given the timing and sequence of how the incident unfolded. Some LIHKG users also found that some screenshots of the WhatsApp conversations posted in the first post were edited. Others questioned whether there was ever an extra-marital affair, given that some of X’s previous posts suggested otherwise. Despite this scepticism, X did not face any “punishments” from netizens. Most netizens were uninterested in doing justice to the wife. For instance, whereas some netizens pointed out the moral ambiguity in romantic relationships, many others mourned a “moral decline” and argued with emotionally driven replies such as “I hope your partner will cheat on you in the future.” Many netizens were only enthusiastic about schadenfreude—or in Cantonese, “eating peanuts” (sik6 fa1 sang1)—as the incident was nothing more than entertainment for them.

During the entire incident, hardly any netizens questioned the legitimacy of using online platforms to publicly name and shame an individual for allegedly breaching moral conduct in their private lives. Neither was the violation of the privacy of the wife and her close others by the actions of netizens questioned. After a few months of inactivity on social media, X resumed promoting his products at public events in the summer of 2022. Ultimately, the rights and wrongs of the different parties became ambiguous, but X’s wife and her alleged lover lost their reputation, privacy, and jobs. By the end of our online ethnography period, X, his “friend,” and some indignant netizens supporting him had silently removed most of the accusatory content as the incident faded out.

The harassment, social isolation, and loss of social reputation and jobs X’s wife and her alleged lover endured as well as the harassment her female colleague and the younger sister of the alleged lover experienced all stemmed from some unvalidated claims. These claims, in turn, were taken by netizens as the basis to legitimize extra-legal actions to punish the individuals for allegedly violating socially sanctioned morality. Existing literature suggests that informal justice-seeking has helped victims of sexual violence to draw public attention to their plight. Informal justice-seeking in this way is credible. However, the dynamics online are too complex for a straightforward characterization of informal justice-seeking as a solely positive practice. The incident examined in the present study suggests the duality of informal justice-seeking and a need to critically reconsider whether, under what circumstances, and how informal justice-seeking may produce justice or inadvertently produce injustice.

Discussion and conclusion

The present study illustrates how gender digilantism and informal justice-seeking in cyberspace have legitimized bystanders’ co-perpetration of cyber IPV, turning it from primarily dyadic violence to networked violence. Our study makes three major contributions to the literature.

First, our findings caution optimism about digilantism and informal justice-seeking in empowering victim-survivors of sexual and gender-based violence. Our findings echo the technofeminist perspective on the relationship between technology and gender. Judy Wajcman (2004, 2007, 2010) considers technology as neither inherently and one-sidedly subversive nor complicit in gender relations. Rather, technology and gender relations are mutually constitutive of each other. The “interpretive flexibility” (Wajcman, 2000) of technology, meaning that technologies are differently appropriated and domesticated by their users, produces the gendered consequences of a particular technological artifact. Technology can be mobilized to empower women and to promote gender justice; at the same time, it can be used to punish alleged gender transgression and exacerbate the harm that victims of gender-based violence experience, thereby producing injustice, as the present study illustrates.

Second, our findings allow a critical reflection on the roles of bystanders in cyber IPV. As mentioned, extant research on the roles of bystanders in IPV tends to focus on their positive roles of intervention in violent episodes and in the control of violence. Our research highlights the potential negative roles of bystanders, particularly bystanders in cyberspace, in incidents of cyber IPV, as bystanders of cyber IPV are often highly connected and anonymous yet disembedded from offline networks. These characteristics increase the temporal and spatial reach of their acts, amplify the consequences of their behaviors, and remove the accountability of their actions.

Third, our findings add to the emergent literature on cyber IPV in Western societies by illustrating the dynamics of cyber IPV in a Chinese context. We also add to the nascent literature on digilantism and informal justice-seeking in Chinese contexts. Existing research in this area has mostly focused on the use of informal justice-seeking in maintaining public interests, in achieving social justice, or for issues related to public figures. Examples include the use of informal justice-seeking to penalize animal rights violators, expose corrupt officials, or find love affairs of celebrities. Limited research has examined its use to intervene in the private matters of ordinary citizens. As the study by Huang (2023) and the present study illustrate, this research area needs further scholarly attention. Increased connectivity in the digital age may, in dramatic ways, blur the divide between the public and the private, thus making private issues public agendas in cyberspace.

Despite the significance of our contributions, we do not intend to claim generalization in terms of the roles that netizens and bystanders may play in networked cyber IPV. Our research is a case study aiming to draw attention to the potential risk of netizens co-perpetrating some specific forms of cyber IPV. It does not provide evidence about the extent and scale of bystander involvement in cyber IPV. Nevertheless, our findings and the concept of “networked cyber IPV” developed here have general relevance. While conducting online ethnography on this case of cyber IPV, we encountered another similar incident; however, here the wife exposed her husband online and accused him of committing adultery. The accused husband is a celebrity, and in response to the wife’s accusation online, there was instant public outrage, leading to the accused husband losing millions of Hong Kong dollars in sponsorship and performance contracts. This incident suggests that public shaming as a form of cyber IPV may be particularly salient among public figures, whose visibility could easily be weaponized to commit cyber IPV or to make them more vulnerable to it. Nevertheless, as the present study suggests, cyber IPV through public shaming is also a problem faced by ordinary people.

Netizens’ actions in our case study also involved cyber sexual harassment (Powell et al., 2020) and cyberbullying (Slonje et al., 2013). The netizens not only co-perpetrated cyber IPV but also committed cyber sexual harassment against the accused wife, her female colleague, and the sister of the alleged lover. The co-existence of different forms of technology-facilitated violence illustrates not only the networked nature of violence committed in cyberspace but also the challenges to combat it. The present study also highlights the challenges to conceptualizing technology-facilitated violence. On the one hand, researchers and policymakers need conceptual clarity and boundary-drawing to focus on a specific form of violence. On the other hand, such an effort may impede a comprehensive understanding of violence committed with the use of ICT because of the high likelihood of bystander involvement and the co-existence of multiple forms of violence.

Acknowledgments

We are very thankful to the two anonymous reviewers for patiently reading three revisions of this paper and for their constructive comments. We thank the editor for his insightful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential competing interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research is partly supported by a grant by the Hong Kong Research Grant Council.

Notes on contributors

Susanne Y. P. Choi

Susanne Y. P. Choi is Professor of Sociology and Co-director of the Gender Research Centre at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her current projects compare cyber dating abuse and cyber sexual harassment in Hong Kong, Taiwan, mainland China, and Japan. She is also writing a book on how class, gender and sexuality intersect to shape the intimacies of sexual minorities in China.

Henry H. S. Kan

Henry H. S. Kan is an MPhil student in sociology at The University of Hong Kong. His research interests include gender, sexuality, care, and family in East Asia. His current research project explores Hong Kong sexual minorities’ life planning primarily using qualitative interviews. He is also working with Prof. Susanne Choi on a research project on cyber sexual violence.

Notes

1 “Cockroaches” was a dehumanizing term used by the extremists in the pro-government camp and their supporters in Hong Kong to refer not only to frontline protestors in the 2019 Anti-Extradition Bill Movement but also to the younger generation in general, as most of them were pro-democracy.