Key term: Cyber Mobs
“Mobs from dominant groups are notorious for shaming relatively powerless groups, in taking delight in the discomfort of the excluded and stigmatized. Cyber mobs gather online to harass individuals in degrading and threatening ways”, where “posters compete to be the most of ensive, the most abusive”. (Citron, 5). This mob mentality can push cyber harassment and stalking to even higher levels, as members of the cyber mob constantly compete to one-up their peers and abuse the victim more than the last person.

Problem/Solution:

As the internet expands and constantly becomes more  integrated with society and can lead to real-world problems, how can one distinguish legitimate articles found on the internet from ones made by trolls or by other malicious people on the internet?  That is, how can, for example, an employer, when researching about a new possible hire, differentiate legitimate articles pertaining to the candidate from untrue ones? This can also hold true for the opposite: suppose a person fabricates false credentials and simply puts them online to look more favorable. How can one find what is true?

Solution(?): Are there companies employers can hire to dig through the files on the information and find relevant ones? Are there computer programs that can do that and somehow verify what sources are legitimate? If one wants to hide the many false websites in a google search pertaining to them, is there a program/service that can generate thousands of irrelevant articles that come up and effectively bury the negative ones deep within the web? Would this option make google/search engines somewhat useless as people could simply hide whatever they didn’t want found? Would people be able to use such programs to generate a plethora of false information about a person, ultimately increasing the potency of online defamation/harassment?