Luke Gittos: Why Rape Culture Is A Dangerous Myth

"In order to enact punishment, these informal online tribunals don't need evidence, because the point is not to find out the truth. Hashtag justice is merely a forum through which individual experience is validated and confirmed in the most public way possible." 

- The authors says that the people discussing topics such as high profile cases of assault and rape in the media don't find out the evidence and facts behind the case. Instead they just discuss their views on it which can be dangerous as obviously, some people are coming at it from a biased angle. He believes that sometimes conclusions are made about peoples guilt without first having all the facts. This could be a result of the immediacy of social media and with it being a platform where people are relatively free to say what the believe

"They had not given him the opportunity to investigate or take actions. Instead they had immediately set up a Facebook page"

- The author argues that some social media activists go about their campaigns in the wrong way. In the case of a Cambridge based kebab shop worker being accused of sexual assault by some customers, the local university community took it upon themselves to launch a social media campaign boycotting the kebab shop. Instead of taking the issue directly to the owners of the kebab shop and getting them to try and resolve the issue from within, the author states that they didn't give the restaurant a fair chance to fix the issue. Instead effectively beginning a hate campaign which wouldn't provide any kind of solution

"Individuals can effectively be held hostage by pending allegations and forced to cave into 'demands', while having their reputation permanently tarnished by the fact of the allegations themselves."

- In cases where the accused runs a business that relies on any kind of customer base or even has a job or career, especially those in the spotlight, the accusations alone could put their livelihoods at risk. Whilst this may be forgivable if the accusations are true and based in fact, with the increased use of social media for activism and the circulation of news, the information being recounted may be less based in fact and therefore might not be true.

"This web-based 'ransoming' is disastrous for any genuine victims of sexual violence. It scuppers the possibility for any objective investigation and makes it extremely difficult for any proper adjudication of the case to happen."

- He also makes the point that the accusation of people on social media is a pointless endeavour anyway as it doesn't allow for proper judgement of the case so a reliable conclusion can not be reached in this way. He states that this is destructive for both the accused and the victim, as the accused reputation is at stake, especially if this hashtag campaign is one the ends up in the mainstream media. And for the victim it doesn't bring them any closer to having closure or justice through legal action.