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Comment by ecshafer | Hacker News Reader

We have this concept in the western world of being presumed innocent until proven guilty. Something like a sexual assault accusation is typically taken extremely seriously (As it should), but this can lead it to being weaponized. Maybe a manager who is a rival for a position you covet, well a sexual assault accusation may make them conveniently go away.

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While we can easily find a ton of documented cases of sexual assault, cases of false accusations seem relatively sparse.

Sucks to be one of the 'relatively sparse' cases then.

Lots of cases are ultimately thrown out due to lack of evidence. Even Kevin Spacey was acquitted.

Absolutely; though in context of the article, names aren't being named and nobody's being accused. It's literally a private-ish list of "stay away from/be careful around these people".

Police will only spend resources on investigations if the serverity of the crime is high enough or there is political force that allows more resources to be used than the crime is worth. False accusations do not carry the same serverity as the crime being claimed, for reasons that people are very open about.

We are however seeing more action from police since metoo, with gps data, Google and ai searches being taken from those who report sa as well as the accused. Phone data allows for some basic checks, like if the two people were in the same location at the time the assault occured. Ai and search data can also verify if people search for relevant information days before the event occurred.

i think that people should reflect extremely carefully on whether they want to be the person following this line of logic publicly

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