SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
China's Cyberposse
from the New York Times (Registration Required)
... Human-flesh search engines--renrou sousuo yinqing--have become a Chinese phenomenon: they are a form of online vigilante justice in which Internet users hunt down and punish people who have attracted their wrath.
The goal is to get the targets of a search fired from their jobs, shamed in front of their neighbors, run out of town. It's crowd-sourced detective work, pursued online--with offline results.
There is no portal specially designed for human-flesh searching; the practice takes place in Chinese Internet forums like Mop, where the term most likely originated. Searches are powered by users called wang min, Internet citizens, or Netizens.
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