what is a complex legal case involving consent, drugs and alcohol<\/a>.<\/p>\nBut none of that becomes easier to answer when strangers add details and assign motives from behind a keyboard.<\/p>\n
I normally steer clear of the misogyny and moralising these cases attract online. But this week, something beyond the usual trial by public opinion kept appearing in my feed.<\/p>\n
What caught my attention was the prurient commentary attached to photographs\u00a0of a woman they claim is Jane Doe and a man presented as her current boyfriend, screenshotted from Facebook and Instagram.<\/p>\n
\u201cI get why people have a cuck fetish, imagine this beauty with her sassy charm bringing over her army of bulls to her dorm room and you get the pleasure of watching,\u201d one such post said.<\/p>\n
I saw loads of similar posts displaying the couple\u2019s names and social media handles, although the complainant is identified in court papers as Jane Doe and I had seen no verified link between her and the people pictured.<\/p>\n
One user acknowledged that the identification was unconfirmed, informing others that they had \u201cbatch downloaded\u201d her social media posts in case it was later confirmed to be true.<\/p>\n
I couldn\u2019t see what these photographs were supposed to establish about the allegations, but their usefulness to people looking for someone to humiliate was obvious.<\/p>\n
The sexual commentary tells us little about what happened at Cornell, and quite a lot about what these posters want us to think about the woman they have identified.<\/p>\n
Their ordinary photographs became props in a story that strangers had written online: the man became someone to pity or mock, the woman someone to expose and ridicule.<\/p>\n
It was clearly an attempt to dress up sexual humiliation dressed as an investigation.<\/p>\n
The mistaken identity of the people in the images would compound the harm to them, but the correct identification of the woman would not, by itself, establish any public interest in circulating the photographs either.<\/p>\n
The posts I saw offered no verified link between the couple and the case, but that uncertainty did not stop the photographs circulating.<\/p>\n
The identification of the couple was repeated as though repetition itself amounts to proof.<\/p>\n
Their exposure came with little apparent consideration of whether the intrusion was justified.<\/p>\n
It was a grim layer on top of what\u2019s already a horrendous case, and I couldn\u2019t help but notice the parallels between this and the recent Lindsay Clancy case, where discussion of the deaths of three children expanded into scrutiny of their father Patrick\u2019s relationship with his new wife.<\/p>\n
The circumstances were very different, but the assumption felt familiar: publicly accessible photographs were seen as fair game, and anyone connected to the story could be made to account for their private life.<\/p>\n
High levels of engagement mean the scope for investigations expands, because that behaviour is seen as rewarding.<\/p>\n
The problem only multiplies when people repeat claims or re-share photographs to the point that this becomes evidence in its own right.<\/p>\n
There is a thrill in being first to find something and winning approval from an invested audience.<\/p>\n
Believing that you\u2019re helping to secure justice can make that participation feel righteous, even when your claims remain unverified.<\/p>\n
But when you\u2019re trying so hard to be a detective, it\u2019s easy to lose sight of the fact that you may have become someone that others need protecting from.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"THE INTERNET LETS anyone be who they want to be, but at some point, everyone chooses to be…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":644981,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[10542,273905,35499,174724,93,61,174725,60,40078,58],"class_list":["post-644980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-algorithms","tag-cornell-rape-allegations","tag-cornell-university","tag-diary-of-a-man-on-the-internet","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-internet-diaries","tag-ireland","tag-rape","tag-social-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/644980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=644980"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/644980\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/644981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=644980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=644980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=644980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}