Runaway Justice: Exploring the Effects of Motivation and Monitoring Groups on Human Flash Search

• Main Authors: CHEN, PING-HAO, 陳品浩
• Other Authors: LIN, YU-SHENG
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/878vyb

碩士 === 國立臺北大學 === 犯罪學研究所 === 104 === “Human flesh search “is used to indicate an temporary online group discusses a certain people, an event or an unusual incident. The group aims to find a certain people with numerous clues provided by the internet users. Nowadays, human flesh search is frequently appeared in our daily lives. However, it may violate the Personal Information Protection Act. This research tried to examine if some factors, which could restrain the traditional crime, may trigger a human flesh search. This research applies Routine Activities Theory to explain the motivation behind the happening of "human flesh search." An experimental design were employed to examine the tri-factors involved in criminal acts and found that in an absence or a vacuum of capable guardians, the mechanism of guardianship has a different impact for the virtual world. Monitorization does not increase with the multiplication of crowd. On the contrary, this study shows that the effect might in fact decrease as the amount of online traffic increases. This research sets out to explain the possible reasons behind the loss of efficacy for the capable guardians, by placing either the attentions from an internal group (comments by netizens) or the attentions from the external group (reports by news media) as variable. The results indicate that the participants are less likely to provide information when media comments are present, but the result is not significant enough to be conclusive in the one manipulating netizen comments as its variable. The inconclusive result might be although the efficacy of the capable guardians is observed to decrease, it might still be kept at a sufficiently influential level, which leads to an unchanged behavioural pattern. The second possibility might be the group could create an impact on individual judgement concerning whether to conduct doxing or not, resulting in both a push and a pull effect that is different from the influence of capable guardians. As to the reasons for this second possible mental status, the findings are insufficient to draw a conclusion. Besides, four motivations, which may cause the human flesh research, were examined: Sense of justice, the desire to know, dissatisfaction and joy and sense of belonging to the herd. Only sense of justice could have significant effects on the participants' reactions. The participants with higher sense of justice were more likely to provide information and initiate a human flesh research.