The Price of Digital Vigilantism: Social media convicts first, asks questions later and often too late

 It is possible in the future everything will be recorded, uploaded and consumed, and by that ubiquitousness, the concept of public shaming becomes redundant. We are, however, not in the future, but at a point where the tools are available but its effects unknown. To make something public is to take an occurrence into a different orbit where different rules apply, both as reward and risk. Shimjitha Musthafa, a 35-year-old influencer from Kerala, is now experiencing this phenomenon. A post about a man alleg­edly deliberately elbow-brushing her body in a crowded bus has led to him committing suicide, and after widespread outrage, she has now been arrested for abetment to suicide.

The video is open to interpretation depend­ing on who is seeing it and at what angle. It can be construed that he was sexually harassing her or, as many think, this is something that invol­untarily happens in a crowd. What Shimjitha did was in the nature of an entrapment by her own account. She saw another girl being made uncomfortable by him and so moved towards him to take a video. If the video had been clear-cut, it would have been a different story. But it is not. Or even if true, his ac­tion is not in the same degree of harassment as, say, someone masturbating next to a woman, as happened in Kerala some years back in which the perpetrator was arrested.

To see everything as possible content is common to social media personalities, but the real world, at least for the moment, is still offline. After the clip went viral, she made another post about how it was necessary to do so because such harassment was a social menace, and it was up to those around the man, like his family, to talk to him about his actions. There is no trace of doubt in her over the quan­tum of punishment she had deemed he deserved. Could she have anticipated that he would kill himself? No, and that is why her arrest is also questionable. It was the news of the suicide becoming viral that led to it, pulling her into the vortex of the same forces that she was worshipping.