more online revenge

In line with Howard French’s NYT article “Mob Rule on China’s Internet: the Keyboard as Weapon,”  China Daily reports that a young woman in Shandong has taken out her anger at her father’s infidelity via the web. The college freshman produced an  “Anti-mistress website” with details of the affair that led to her parents’ divorce this year. As China Daily notes, “she would rather sacrifice her father’s promising political career for a happy, re-united family.” [I couldn’t locate the actual site in Chinese.]

Jason blogged here about “China’s Most Famous Sexual Pervert,” the incident French writes about, in which an extramarital affair was exposed in all its detail to an online World of Warcraft community. This led to an “Internet hunt” for the male lover and the exposure of his most private information.  The same thing, in essence, happened in the kitten crushing incident, when Chinese netizens hunted down a woman shown crushing a kitten to death with her spiked heels in an online video–the woman ultimately issued a public apology on television.

The girl in this case has not produced anything which leads to mob rule, rather she has exposed the family’s shame for all to see.  Given the stress and pressures of contemporary life in China, I would expect more such acts of private revenge, in addition to increased numbers of Chinese smart mobs who coalesce around specific issues.