Will the me too movement create unjust, false and wrongly decided cases?

Thank you @罗志 for raising the following question in the comments:

At present, you are mainly discussing in theory. If you combine some actual situations in the development of the MeToo movement in China and the United States, I would like to ask you how to view the public’s appeal for emotions far outweighing the necessary logic and evidence amidst the upsurge of public opinion. Pay attention to? In other words, the judicial process has institutional arrangements to ensure procedural justice, but public opinion has no centralized authority to coordinate and manage it. Is the difference between public opinion and civil litigation important here? How should we think about preventing carnival, irrational "judgment by the media"? Furthermore, if the cost of reporting is low (such as anonymity), the effect is good (you can directly appeal to public opinion to ruin the other party’s reputation), and there is no penalty for lying and reporting false cases (the media does not or cannot fact-check and no one holds the liar accountable). Will it cause many unjust, false and wrongly decided cases, and ruin many people's careers and personal dignity? Thank you.

In addition, to clarify, what I said does not mean that I support the above doubts. It is my professional training that makes me like the collision of opinions and stimulate each other. The truth should be more and more clear. Of course, this clarification itself also shows that the trend of political correctness has brought some concerns and considerations to my discussions.

This question is very important and typical, so I think it is necessary to open a separate post to answer it.

I think that under the current (and foreseeable future) social/cultural/technical conditions, the concern about "MeToo movement leading to public opinion frenzy and the proliferation of unjust, false and wrongly decided cases" is unnecessarily over-concerned. This is not to say that at the [logical] level , the possibility of unjust, false and wrongly decided cases does not exist. Rather, given the [constraints of the empirical world we live in] (there are exceptions to these constraints, which I will talk about below), such unjust, false and wrongly decided cases whose reputations and lives have been completely ruined by the MeToo movement like you said , at best is a very individual case.

We might as well start from the consequences of the MeToo movement so far: so far, can the opponents cite even one case of unjust, false and wrongful convictions caused by the MeToo movement that ruined the reputation and life of the accused? At least I haven't seen this happen yet.
Instead, we can see the following two situations:
One is "trying to frame (or phishing) but no one cares about or is quickly seen through" . For example, after the pedophile scandal of the Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore was exposed, his Republican supporters tried to win back for him by means of phishing: a woman pretended to be Moore's victim and took the initiative to report to a Washington Post reporter "Breaking the Whistleblower", I hope that reporters will take the bait and write unfounded reports, thus damaging the credibility of the mainstream media that criticized Moore. But when the reporter asked the "whistleblower" to provide evidence, the latter was immediately overwhelmed and was spotted by the reporter.
A similar situation has also happened after Zhang Wen's sexual assault scandal was exposed in the past few days. After the first few women came forward to accuse Zhang Wen, a screenshot claiming that Zhang Wen had various unbearable sexual fetishes began to circulate on the Internet in a small area. However, the content of the screenshot was immediately pointed out by Zhang Wen’s former colleagues as untrue. It is very likely that Zhang Wen’s supporters tried to use this to muddy the water. After the successful “fishing”, no one believed the other real allegations.
The second is "things happen for a reason but make a big deal out of a molehill. Although there was a momentary disturbance, it quickly calmed down and did not cause much impact." For example, a woman who was dating actor Aziz Ansari anonymously accused him of not respecting the woman's wishes during the date. After the post was published, most of the commenters pointed out that although Ansari’s actions were inappropriate, they were definitely not on the same level as most of the things exposed by the MeToo movement; It subsided and did not have much impact on his career.
So at least until now, the "hit rate" of the #MeToo movement is astonishingly high, but the "accidental injury rate" is close to zero.

Of course, we can do two types of follow-up questions at this time. One is: there are indeed no unjust, false or wrongly decided cases now, but how can we guarantee that there will not be any in the future? How can we ensure that the #MeToo movement will not gradually lose its shape?
This requires us to further investigate, what is the specific mechanism for the exposure and repercussions of a similar incident? For example, in your question, you worry about the consequences of media decentralization and anonymous accusations, but let’s think about it in reverse, if an anonymous post suddenly appeared on reddit (or Baidu Tieba) accusing a certain celebrity of sexual assault, public opinion How will you react? Is it to believe without thinking, without any further evidence?
of course not. Whether it is due to the market demand of the media, the self-interested considerations of the parties involved and stakeholders, or people's enthusiasm for the truth (gossip), there will be people who will dig out the identity of the anonymous whistleblower and deliberate on the information in the post. Whether the details are reliable, to question the perception of those close to the accused person, to put a reward on finding other potential victims, etc.
That is to say, regardless of whether the public opinion is decentralized or not, and whether the initial whistleblower is anonymous or not, whether the final revelation can be turned into a "real hammer" and can form a voice of condemnation and punishment against the accused depends on the subsequent supplementary evidence. Otherwise, in the Internet age, when new news constantly overwhelms old news and attention is constantly diverted, such unsustainable anonymous revelations will soon be submerged in the frenzy of fragmented information.
On the other hand, the revelations of actual cases are actually far less decentralized than imagined . Generally speaking, individual victims are worried about retaliation and lack sufficient influence and channels. Therefore, in order to create momentum, people with experience and resources are often needed as intermediaries to collect, screen, and release revelations. For the sake of their own credibility, these intermediaries have to make some judgments about the reliability of the news. For example, the China Post reporter in the aforementioned Roy Moore scandal; another example is Professor Wang Ao in the recent Shenyang incident, Huang Xueqin in the Zhang Peng incident, etc., and these years have played an important role in exposing the scandal of sexual assault in American academic circles. The role of the "feministphilosophers" platform operation team and so on. So most of the time, even if the whistleblowers are anonymous to the public, their identities are very clear and secure to these intermediaries and organizers .
The above is based on the constraints of experience, why we don’t have to worry about the MeToo movement becoming a carnival of public opinion that persecutes innocent people wantonly.

However, these constraints can be broken under certain circumstances. What specific situation? It is the “public” public opinion on the surface , which is actually only a tool manipulated by those in power to persecute specific groups, and lacks real publicity (that is, allowing parties involved in disputes and their sympathizers to openly participate in the process of cross-examination) .

For example, the Cultural Revolution was such an example. The big-character posters shouted who to beat, but in fact it was just a reflection of the supreme leader's personal will. Another example is the South of the United States during the apartheid era. Black young men were often groundlessly accused of "indecent assault on white women" and were lynched by white mobs without due process; But if we look carefully at the historical details, we know that at that time, the South set various restrictions on blacks and whites who sympathized with blacks, from the right to speech to the right to participate in politics, all in order to maintain apartheid and trample blacks under their feet forever Not to stand up is the highest goal. "Public opinion" in this case excludes the participation of specific groups from the beginning, and of course it cannot be regarded as "public".
I think we should be able to say with more confidence now that the above-mentioned situation will not occur in contemporary America, so the MeToo movement will not fall into a similar situation. Of course, China’s system has great flaws. Some people may worry that the government will use #MeToo to selectively eliminate dissidents (such as selectively expelling liberal professors who sexually harass students, but opening the Internet to pro-government professors who also sexually harass students. On the one hand), or take the opportunity to carry out campaigns such as "Rectification of Teachers' Morality in Colleges and Universities". But on the one hand, I don’t think the current government has such complete control over public opinion, and I don’t think the political circle is so clean that they dare to take the opportunity to act without fear of getting burned; on the other hand, even if the government really has the intention to do so The nest still does not mean that the MeToo movement itself is creating unjust, false and wrongly decided cases.

Another type of question about "hit rate " and "accidental injury rate" is: Is the "utilitarian" calculation method itself appropriate to evaluate the "hit rate/accidental injury rate"? Even if it is just to "accidentally injure" an innocent person, it will cause immeasurable damage to this person's reputation and life! Shouldn't we "rather let go a thousand than wrong one"?
This brings us back to the "two-way" issue mentioned earlier. Public opinion whether to believe or not to believe an accusation is not only affected by the accused (suspected perpetrator), but also the accuser (suspected victim); especially on the issue of sexual assault, an accusation is rejected by people around , the blow to the victim is no less devastating than the blow to the wronged by false accusations. Only emphasizing the impact of "accidental injury" on the accused sexual assaulter, while refusing to take the impact of "indulging in evil" on the actual sexual assault victim with the same seriousness, is tantamount to naturally putting the rights of the accused before the rights of the accuser ; This in itself may reflect some kind of prejudice in a patriarchal society.
Note that I am not saying here that the rights and interests of the accuser are naturally higher than those of the accused, so we do not have to consider how to protect the accused from being slandered (as mentioned earlier, the actual operation of the MeToo movement is very difficult. To a large extent, it is the protection of this aspect). Rather, it is an inevitable step to balance the interests of the two aspects by taking the "hit rate/accidental rate" into consideration . It is impossible for us to completely put aside this kind of probability considerations and talk about the protection of the rights and interests of the suspects while ignoring the protection of the rights and interests of the victims. We can only do our best to make this balancing act better. And one of the keys to this is to constantly correct our past wrong presuppositions of the "default credibility" of testimony through a better understanding of social realities such as the psychological mechanism of sexual assault and "rape culture", and strive to improve the final judgment Probability of matching the truth .

Supplementary Note: In the follow-up discussion of this article, some people lamented that the rise of MeToo forced everyone to stand in line, either one or the other, "Anyone who suspects that MeToo may create unjust, false and wrongful convictions will be labeled as a conspiracy by MeToo fanatics." , "There is no room in the world to retain the nuanced position." I think the opposite is actually the case. Those who hold this view are not nuanced enough in their own thinking.

One of its manifestations is the failure to understand what is said in the last part of this article. The balance between the rights and interests of the prosecution and the defense is actually inevitable, even in the pre-MeToo era; therefore, the only thing we can do is to Better empirical understanding to adjust our "default credibility" judgments on the efficacy and strength of evidence (and our past related judgments are extremely problematic), and strive to win between false positives (wronging good people) and false negatives (letting go the bad guy, and applying secondary damage to the real victim).

The second manifestation is to confuse two types of events: the probability of "someone A made false accusations against certain B during the #MeToo movement" and "someone B was unable to clear up the false accusation in time, and finally suffered an unjust injustice." The probability of ; the former is a static, single-round event, and the latter is the result achieved through the dynamic process of cross-examination. As long as the accused party has a channel to issue a defense (the emergence of the Internet has made such channels more diverse and less likely to be monopolized), the probability of injustice caused by the dynamic cross-examination process is much lower than that of a single round of static events. To examine the fratricide rate of MeToo, we should start from its aspects as a dynamic process, rather than stop at a static incident cross-section.