However, I don't know what's going to work to take people with vast amounts of power out of power for wrongdoing, either. What we've done in the past doesn't appear to have consistently worked. So here we are, unfortunately.
Trivial but serious answer: You might not know. Harvey Weinstein got Ashley Judd and Mira Sorvino blacklisted, and neither of them knew why they suddenly weren't getting roles.
It would be nice if we could build a gossip network which was immune to malicious gossip, but I don't know how one would go about doing that.
I don't have an answer. Clearly, it is problematic that you can have your career derailed by a bogus accusation. The real world is complicated and judging the feed of incoming information we get is a hard problem.
But two things I'm pretty sure of:
* The fundamental concern the "due process" people are articulating isn't unique to gender relations, but has its most powerful emotional impact for dudes in those kinds of controversies. Something is broken about that.
* "The police should resolve it" is clearly not the answer; in fact, that's a conclusion foreclosed by logic, since the standard of proof the police and prosecutors work on is so much higher than any standard used by people in their ordinary lives.
In particular, I would be interested to see examples where peoples’ careers have been ruined by sexual harassment, rape or gender discrimintion accusations that were legitimately baseless. I think that “the court of public opinion” is a red herring, because from what I can tell news outlets that people take seriously put serious due diligence into finding evidence against the accused. And as you said, they do not need to abide by the standard of reasonable doubt that the court system requires.
I also think that this discussion is mind of muddied by peoples’ perception of how likely accusations are to be believed. If someone starts a rumor about your job performance, that might be equally believable to a rape accusation, but it’s frankly not serious or “juicy” enough to really spread around. That won’t be reported in a major newspaper or make the rounds on Twitter. It’s just not going to attract eyeballs. But your example of child pornography is a good one, and probably comparable in my opinion. If someone is actually concerned about rumors against, I think it’s fair to give them that rape accusations are more worth worrying about in terms of damage than a rumor that people are going to sort of shrug off and not leave any one team or company.
One thing that I like to think about with respect to accusation validity - is there a heuristic we can use to informally determine the likelihood of an accusation before we find the conclusion? For example, if we are self-aware in acknowledging that our bar for truth is lower than a court, can we find commonalities in reaction or public response that are generally unique to people who actually did do the things they’re accused of? It’s not rigorous, but then again it doesn’t really have to be - most examples of careers being ruined by these accusations feature at least three different women. I think that if you can find three unrelated accusations, that’s a reasonable degree of certainty for the public, especially when you consider that these accusers do not typically have an incentive to collude (they don’t get anything material from publicized accusations).
The underlying problem is how to calibrate your heuristic. To know if the heuristic is any good you would need to know which accusations are true to begin with, which is the original problem.
> I think that if you can find three unrelated accusations, that’s a reasonable degree of certainty for the public, especially when you consider that these accusers do not typically have an incentive to collude (they don’t get anything material from publicized accusations).
They get whatever motivates anyone to make a false accusation (revenge, blackmail, jealousy, attention), with the added incentive of knowing that a previous accusation provides false credibility.
Relying on due process and the court system is one way to prevent people like Harvey Weinstein from carrying through on a threat of "I'll make sure you never work in this industry again", but it's not the only one. Taking rumours and innuendo at face value, on the other hand, is guaranteed to hand more power to abusive people.
There are people who are very good at detecting these kind of weaknesses and exploiting them. Whenever a system of power or control is overreacting or is irrational about something, let's say terrorism, there will be people who will report their neighbors for "bomb making" or anti-government propaganda knowing the government will overreact and ruin that person's life. Instead of terrorism and government it could be a company's HR and this sexual harassment rumor network, or reporting someone for neglecting their children (playing on the "think of the children" irrationality) to the police if they cut the lawn too close to the your fence and so on.
Come now Colin, the answer is clear. We merely use a blockchain featuring anonymous signatures and transactions - parties have to stake N of their own GossipCoin to accuse others of some wrongdoing, and they lose their stake if greater than p other validators disagree. If at least q validators agree, the accused forfeits N GossipCoin :)
TBH (acquired by FB in Oct.) tackled this challenge [0].
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/10/17...
also, i think that in the US a defamation suit requires some sort of assessment the claim being actually true or false (as you can't defame with demonstrable truth), or at least some strong sense of merit, as well as some assessment of malice or bad-faith actions on the accuser/defamer end.
not to mention that there appears to be little enthusiasm for helping falsely accused, or those claiming to be such. there are fears that aggressively pursuing false accusers risks dissuading actual victims. bad situation all around.
When someone makes a false claim without providing any of the specifics like when or where it supposedly happened, how are you supposed to prove it didn't happen under any standard of evidence? Show your whereabouts for every hour of your entire life?
These cases usually have precious little in the way of evidence one way or the other. If it was so easy for an innocent accused to prove they didn't do something then we wouldn't need the high standard of evidence in criminal cases either.