En till:
https://qz.com/1671916/the-global-movement-of-facebook-vigilantes-who-hunt-pedophiles
"There’s a global movement of Facebook vigilantes who hunt pedophiles"
"But using social media to name and shame potential offenders is deeply problematic. It has led to a number of suicides in several countries. The hunters’ efforts can unravel into violence.
They can be counterproductive, endangering ongoing investigations, and the evidence obtained from stings is legally shaky. The hunters harness social networks like Facebook to unleash the all-powerful ostracism of the universally abhorred figure of the child abuser,
but they might not have all the facts and context. They have little regard for due process or expectations of privacy. The stings, live-streamed to an engaged audience, become a spectacle, a form of entertainment—a twisted consequence of Facebook’s mission to foster online communities."
"Weeks is adamant that dealing with online predators is best done through the criminal justice system. But police can’t focus all their resources on sex crimes, and what he can do—posting alleged offenders’ identities online—has an immediate effect. You just don’t know what might happen tomorrow, he says. Putting their faces out there is the “second best thing,” he says.
Several weeks after we spoke, Weeks was arrested on drug charges. According to prosecutors, he has an “extensive criminal history.”
The hunters often have criminal records unrelated to their “hunting”—Blas has one, as does one of the more popular hunters Shane Coyle, and the founder of the hunter group POPSquad, Shane Erdmann."
"There’s an entire genre of news stories in the UK media about pedophile hunter stings gone wrong, where they catch the wrong person, prematurely accuse someone of a crime, cause violent confrontations, or even get infiltrated by an actual sexual predator themselves."
