Few people take their cues from Letitia James or Kathy Hochul. A fair bit more people take theirs from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But whether we admit it or not, we all take our cues from the Feed. It might not tell you what to think, but it tells you what to think about and provides a strong first impression to get you started. And then when people want to know more, they go to Google or ChatGPT.
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More dangerous than James’, Hochul’s, or even AOC’s condemnations of the seven Cornell University students accused of rape are the “dossier sites” that have been established not just to condemn them today, but to ruin them for life.
Before I even heard about the case via any news outlets, my Instagram feed served me a post promoting one such site (even though I barely use my Instagram account, Meta’s algorithms have pretty easily hacked my interest in public humiliations based on questionable accusations). That site is run by a former South Park and MadTV writer, Toby Morton.
In addition to the site he’s built for the seven collectively, Morton says he has purchased “domains associated” with the accused individuals. Presumably, these are “first name-last name.com,” unless one of his fellow travelers scooped up that formula first and he’s including middle initials or some other variation.
One of his regular pieces of Instagram content is sharing screenshots of the conversations he has with his critics, skeptics, or others who have a remnant concern about due process, presumption of innocence, or the dignity of one’s reputation. In one exchange, he responds: “As for ‘waiting for evidence,’ that’s adorable.” A few images later in the same post, he says, “I’m verifying documents, photographs, timelines and records.”
The Cornell students are not the only ones being taken out by the dossier-and-domain approach. It’s taken off among special interest organizations and “predator hunter”-style digital vigilantes.
The dossier approach cures two vulnerabilities left behind by the golden age of cancelations, which would be 2020 plus or minus a few years. Back then, all you needed to do was a lob a few -isms at your target and the mob would flock and take care of the rest. With luck, you might even get media coverage and then the whole thing would go viral. The bar is higher now. Enough people are either skeptical of or desensitized to those vague moral-panicky accusations that they scroll through instead of playing along in the public stoning.
It’s not enough anymore to just hand-wave and meme about having the receipts. Now they want to drop evidence bombs.
As a matter of investigation, these dossiers may be airtight. But as the basis for punishment — or even just for making up your own mind — they are fatally incomplete.
A big part of the reason why prosecutors can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich is because the proceeding is entirely one-sided. These dossier-wielding vigilantes despise the fact that our judicial system is adversarial. The accused have a right to see in advance the evidence that will be used against them. They then have the opportunity to refute or impeach the other side’s case, as well as present their own case.
Half the story is only sufficient if you’ve already made up your mind and are reveling in your self-appointed role as judge-jury-executioner.
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Second, the 2020-era cancelations were devastatingly effective, but they left an opening to rebuild.
One part of the road back for some canceled people was deliberately reclaiming search results for their name. If they didn’t already own it, they would buy “their-name.com” and start building their online persona around that site, directing their social feeds to it, posting content to it, and building back links related to whatever new ventures they were tiptoeing into. It’s painstaking and expensive to overtake a newspaper of record or a buzzy site with high SEO ranking, but it was necessary, and possible.
But by buying “their-target’s-name.com,” these hitmen secure the one digital platform each person can own for him or herself — one that is also immensely powerful for search engine optimization. It’s a first-strike tactic that does serious immediate damage, and denies their target one of the few significant ways to rebuild their online reputation.
They make the cancelation worse at the outset, and even harder to reverse down the road.
If the digital vigilantes had any interest in actual justice, in the system correcting what they see as its failures, they would not be putting so much effort into actions that make a fair trial nearly impossible. It has always been difficult and is now nearly impossible to impanel a jury in a high-profile case that has not already been driven toward one conclusion or another by media coverage. The best the attorneys on either side can hope for is that the jurors have heard equals amounts of inflammatory rhetoric against both sides — not a clean slate, but a balanced one.
Prejudicial comments from politicians and feed-and-search dominating vigilante campaigns set the conditions for a mistrial, for overturning a verdict on appeal, or for prosecutors dismissing or reducing charges because of the impossibility of sitting an impartial jury.
Anyone honestly demanding “justice for Jane Doe” should be berating Letitia James, Kathy Hochul, AOC, and the dossier-and-domain set for making justice impossible for all involved. But that misunderstands these actors. Like any other vigilantes, they have declared the systems of justice defunct and beyond repair. They are not interested in reform or improvement. Instead, they are embracing their atavistic id outside, above, and against the law.
There is too much malice aforethought to chalk these efforts up to misguided virtue signaling. The identity annihilation, the lifelong harm to the accused individuals, are the point.
Years before the internet became a reliable tool of personal destruction, a lawyer told a grieving mother and father, “This will always be there.” Their son, Harry, was a part-time police officer north of New York City. Harry committed suicide in 1987 after his girlfriend broke up with him. For no other reason than it was too close in time and place, Harry’s death got sucked into the Tawana Brawley fiasco. “This will always be there,” the lawyer said as he told the parents that their son’s name, life, and death would always be associated with a scandal that he had nothing to do with.
That was probably incomprehensible to them. These days, it’s a fact of life tucked into the truism that the internet is forever. During the first decade of cancelations, it was a feature and not a bug. Now, for the dossier-slingers, it’s the tagline for their weapon of choice.
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