How 'Human Flesh Search' Is Changing China | Hacker News Reader

How 'Human Flesh Search' Is Changing China

theatlantic.com

86 pointsnsns24 comments

People in China, like everywhere else, want people held accountable for their actions. If government won't do it, they will do it themselves if they can.

I read that people from the provinces experiencing an injustice can go to Beijing to seek justice. But if too many people from a province do that, the province gets in trouble. So the provinces actually send agents to Beijing to kidnap their own people to keep them quiet.

There is no reliable system of courts and appeals and justices that will rule against even the powerful when the cause is just. That simply encourages more injustice.

I think this is China's biggest challenge. It won't change until the rights of the individual are recognized.

It sounds like "Human Flesh Search" is just the Chinese word for Doxing.

Indeed - it reads as if the reporter was unaware of doxing. 4chan is still a sub-subculture I guess.

The angle of it being used to make public affairs more transparent and accountable is interesting. I wonder, do the likes of Eric Holder or Jack Valenti get dosed?

Had to look that up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxing

I've never heard of Doxing (and I read HN) while "Human Flesh Search" is a commonly understood term amoung young people in China. That said, China effectively has a single, unified internet culture, not the many sub-cultures of the english-language internet.

Human Flesh Search is just "人肉搜索" translated word by word, but literally it just means Manual Search, in contrast with automatic search done by machines.

"人肉搜索" coveres a very wide range of topics from its root http://dzh.mop.com/renrou (much like 4chan). E.g. Given the pic with part of a boob and ask for who the celeb is, or some random pic with a nice dress and ask where to buy it. Or you "人肉" the scammer on some Chinese craigslist sites. So later it envolvs identifcation of corrupt official's expensive watch. Theere's a karma-like system to keep the online community engaged.

I welcome the day when this practice, or something similar, catches on in India. Almost every Indian politician has a criminal record, is a thief who siphons money into tax shelters, and does all of this with impunity. Sadly, this trickles down to all the government employees, cops included. This kind of citizen action will expose the crooks for their wrongs and create accountability. Shame is a powerful motivator for change...

It seems to be silly to think this is only a phenomena in China. In the West we have 'doxing'.

That said, this sort of thing is what Internet activists always cite as being what a free internet can do for the world. Citizens can hold their officials accountable by combining their efforts to dig. It is much harder to arrest 10 people in somewhat geographically diverse regions than it is to find one activist.

Though, doxing seems to have a peculiar asymmetry. The doxee is revealed but the doxers remain anonymous (in some cases, Anonymous).

It seems that Chinese "doxers" are more open about their own identities.

That is a very interesting thing especially considering that one would assume that a western 'flesh searcher' would live in a country where political dissent is not punishable by disappearing.

It seems to me that having your ID out there is probably somewhat defensive against disappearing. I mean, someone who's anonymous could just be charged with "possessing child porn" and that's pretty much all anyone would hear, goodbye. Imagine if Julian Assange's wikileaks work had been anonymous--he'd be gone already and nobody would know.

One wouldn't assume that of the USA anymore, I'd think; the US government has been disappearing people since 2001, not to mention killing US citizens with drones who are alleged to have created and published propaganda (but not to have committed direct violence).

So far, such incidents mostly relate to the USA's ongoing state of war, not other kinds of "regular" corruption. However, as groups like Wikileaks and Anonymous butt up against, e.g., the state department and the military industrial complex, I think their members are wise to protect their identities.

I think the difference might stem more from the fact that in the USA (and pretty much all advanced Western democracies) we still have a lot more ability to remain anonymous than do people in China.

The origin of 'doxing' on 4chan was to do things like convince a female that was 'attention-whoring' on the forum to do things like post nude photos of herself. Some people would immediately try to figure out who she was, in some cases they would do things like send the nude photos to work, school, and/or family, in addition to telling everyone in the forum the name/address/etc of the target.

In this sense, it makes sense for the dox'ers to want to remain anonymous. You're convincing someone to do something, then turning it on them to attempt to ruin their life.

So 'doxing' is more specifically about destroying someone's anonymity (or pseudo-anonymity if they maintain an alias), at least in it's origins.

For most of the article, I was wondering how the author could avoid using the words "vigilante" or "vigilantism". It did show up near the end, in quotes, sounding like a positive thing.

It does sound from this article like flesh searches are for comparatively noble causes; but as with any case where vigilante justice is glorified, I have to wonder what proportion of the victims of vigilantism really "had it coming". (To be fair, in a part of the world where rule of law is rather more tenuous, I think there is somewhat more place for such things... but it's a double-edged sword, and the back edge is very sharp.)

This is a natural outcome for a system that has a large number of people but poor rule of law and arbitrary justice.

Fix the legal system and reduce the corruption and you will get a corresponding decrease in "flesh searches".

I think that sums it up pretty well. The citizen reporter Wu Gan ("The Butcher") who the author interviewed for the piece put it thusly:

"Some innocent people have been hurt, [and] personal privacy has not been protected, especially when information is incorrect. This kind of thing only happens in deformed countries. Because there's no rule of law or democracy, the Internet becomes citizens' only means of redress," he wrote to me.

How closely this bears resemblance to what is called doxing here is up for debate; but certainly there is a difference in political import between doxing and this "human flesh search."

To summarize; where the rule of law fails the rule of man takes its place.

Herd mentality (or 'mob mentality'), group intelligence, and -- more to the point -- decentralised decision making spring very quickly to mind. It is dangerous and usually easily taken advantage of, much like other similar structures (eg: stock market, taste in music, religion).

Didn't have time to read the entire story, but I'm a Chinese and I know that story.

So for those of you who didn't know yet, I'd like to point out that, the Internet is currently the only way for people in the "people's republic" to voice publicly and (possibly) get heard and taken cared by the authority.

IIRC, years ago Kai-Fu Lee had a speech at Stanford (?) explained such particular phenomenons (such as why Internet is the only trustworthy news source in China).

HFS, I think it's like giving people the right to have guns, lots of potential for bad things to happen, but still a step forward to democracy.

I think this more a matter of how it's changing not just China but any modern nation. If you have enough of the populace of the internet it's probably happening there and people are gonna be more wary of what they post online.

This came out a few years back on NYT

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Human-t.html?_r...

Human Flesh Search, aka distributed vigilantisim

I've lived in China for many years and heard countless acts of injustice and corruption through Weibo (Chinese Twitter). There are interesting code-names that people use to keep their accounts from being deleted or blocked. Deng's freedom was absolutely due to weibo preasure. Its all about face, and if it can be covered up, face over rules justice. If it goes public, justice must be given...for face. Unfortunately doxing success stories are the minority.

In other words, it's also what the denizens at 4Chan do (specifically /b/) when they "Dox" someone.

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