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Comment by mjcl | Hacker News Reader

It is a mess, but I hope you’re not saying that this is a new or recent phenomenon.

Innocence in a legal sense has always been far removed from public opinion. The existence of things like the police blotter in local newspapers demonstrates that pretty well.

I’m not opining on the righteousness of it, but it seems like a whole lot of people ‘got religion’ w/r/t fairness once it started impacting rich/privileged people.

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Rich and privileged people have always been the main people concerned about the risk of having their reputation tarnished in a widespread way, if for no other reason than rich and privileged and the existence of a widespread reputation to tarnish ordinarily co-exist, so it seems like a weird thing to just recently notice.

The difference is that technology has taken infamy to a global scale, making available a global reserve of vicious, unchecked sadism to those who can figure out how to point the cannon at their desired target. The only thing left to do is to fight over control of the cannon.

Another way to look at it is that privileged people have had the ability to ruin the lives of the less privileged for a long time (see Emmett Till) and global communications has just democratized the process.

It’s not good and I truthfully don’t know how we fix this, but I hope we fix the whole problem and not just the symptom of powerful people being convicted in the court of public opinion.

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