Crowd-sourcing justice: tracking a decade’s news coverage of cyber vigilantism throughout the Greater China region

Abstract

Examining how a newly emerged communication practice has been presented in press reports over time could help delineate the evolvement that the public perception of the practice has undergone. This study analyses how press coverage in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan framed the practice of cyber vigilantism ‒ defined as a mediated search whereby people use digital media to look for and publicize private information about some individuals ‒ over a decade span. We found that despite its controversies, the practice has been greeted with great enthusiasm since 2006. The public responses tended to become conservative in recent years. The news coverage in China provided more rigorous discussion about cyber vigilantism and contained a greater mix of optimistic and critical responses than that in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Implications of these findings are discussed in details.

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