It seems that everyone has commented on or even criticized something on the Internet. In the face of some criminal cases, even people who have not been convicted, just because of suspicion, will become the target of various hateful comments online. There have been many innocent people that have died as a result of how they have been affected by the public’s speech. A large number of people choose to take their own lives because they cannot bear the pressure of external public opinion. This has lead to the right to criticize or talk about others online to be questioned. Whether or not an individual is innocent until proven guilty by the evidence of the judicial branch should also apply to public opinion so that the judicial branch has sufficient independence to investigate cases. This essay discusses why innocent until proven guilty should apply to public censure, focusing on the consequences of unlimited right to comment.

In order to begin this explanation, one should first define ‘innocent until proven guilty’ and public censure. The former refers to ‘Presumption of Innocence’, which is a principle that requires the government to prove the guilt of a criminal defendant and relieves the defendant of any burden to prove his or her innocence. The principle of the presumption of innocence in the modern sense, as the opposite product of the presumption of guilt in feudal society, was formed and developed on the basis of denying the feudal litigation system after the victory of the bourgeois revolution. First of all, the Italian jurist Beccaria proposed in his classic book "On Crimes and Punishments" in 1764: "No one can be called a criminal before a guilty verdict is made." "Anyone, when his crime is not proven, should be regarded as an innocent person according to the law.” With the victory of the bourgeois revolution, France stipulated in Article 9 of the ‘Human Rights Proclaimer’ in 1789: ‘Anyone shall be presumed innocent unless he is declared guilty.’ In December 1948 Article 11, paragraph 1, of the ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations General Assembly stipulates: ‘Anyone who has been charged with a criminal offence shall be deemed not guilty until his guilt has not been confirmed in a public trial in accordance with the law.’

For the purpose of this essay, I will refer to Cyberbullying, a form of public censure that is understood as violent behavior carried out through the Internet and often seen as essentially the same as physical violence. Most of the condemnation and abuse on the Internet is actually the weapons of the so-called ‘justice bodyguard’, a number of people that feel that they are righteous, so they think that what they say is a voice for the disadvantaged, and that they are the guardians of justice and fairness.

“We Media” refers to the way in which the general public disseminate their own facts and news via the Internet. It is the general name of the new media, which is a private, universal and independent communicator, and delivers normative and non-normative information to the non-specific majority or specific individual by modern and electronic means.

It is true that in most countries in the United States, every citizen has the right to express his or her opinion freely. This is the right of free speech. Such ideas have been ingrained in people's minds since the beginning of America's independence. The point of this article is not to argue about the correctness of free speech, but to show that the historical context for free speech has evolved, even if the government forces people to silence newspapers when necessary. The law says that people are free to express their opinions, even the government has no right to interfere. This can be seen when looking at Covid-19 measures in the US. Many residents of countries, led by the United States, wore masks during the outbreak. However, some residents considered it undesirable and illegal to force them to wear masks, down to the belief that they have the right to speak freely or do anything. Such beliefs led to nationwide protests and riots, and could be seen as contributing to the spread and exacerbation of the epidemic in those countries to some extent. Therefore, it's not complicated to see that there are two sides to giving people the right to say and to do what they want.

In addition, there are other consequences of unrestricted freedom of speech.  To be more specific, take a recent implication that happened in Australia; “Amy Jayne Dolly Everett was an Australian teenager who committed suicide after being a victim of cyber-bullying. Everett, 14, is a well-known child star in Australia. She started appearing in commercials at the age of six and became a household name after starring in Australian hat brand Akubra. Since then, her every move has been scrutinized, and her appearance changes have been criticized by netizens. She endured such gratuitousabuse for eight years, even though she did not appear on the screen. "I wish she could kill herself." To face such comments on a daily basis is not acceptable to an adult, let alone a minor. In the end, Everett took her own life.”

Another example is when in 2020, two 13-year-old boys in a swimming pool in Deyang, Sichuan, molested a woman, an event that was caught on CCTV. The woman demanded an apology from the two boys for the harassment, but the boys at first refused to comply and instead verbally abused the woman. As what could be perceived as an act of retaliation, the woman's husband then held the boy's head under water, leading to his hospitalization. Later, the parents of the boys came to the hospital, and after learning about the situation, in order not to let the matter expand further, chose to resolve it privately. Nevertheless, a few days later, people posting on WEIBO, a social media app in China, began to condemn the woman and her husband for pushing the child's head into the water. They judged them with such blunt and bitter language that the woman became overwhelmed and, no longer able to cope, committed suicide. Due to the meddling of online ‘’We Media’', the woman's husband was portrayed as an adult who abused his children. However one may judge the husband's behavior in the event, or what role the boy's parents played in the process of this condemnation, it is clear that the online media orchestrated a large part in the woman’s eventual suicide.

In August 2016, the UK Home Affairs Committee published a report on extremism which affects Muslim communities and arose from the activities of terrorist organizations such as Daesh. The report holds that “Social media companies are consciously failing to combat the use of their sites to promote terrorism and killings. Networks like Facebook, Twitter are the vehicle of choice in spreading propaganda and they have become the recruiting platforms for terrorism. People find that they can ‘kill’ others through the Internet without being held responsible, to an extent, and so begins a vicious cycle.

Justice cannot be a defense tool for unreasonable and illegal acts. If unreasonable or even illegal acts can be forgiven and allowed because they are initiated in the name of justice and morality then social order, fairness, and security can be seen, as above, to fall apart. In fact, the judicial power in a society ruled by law should not partly give way to uncontrollable cyber violence. Anti-violence often confronts violence in a more violent way, and confronts unreasonable in an unreasonable way. These are politically correct under the cloak of the rationalization of justice and morality. People often oppose the perpetrators in the movement. It is difficult to realize that you are the perpetrator in another violence. The most important thing is that this kind of violence is concealed, it is rationalized and legalized, it is allowed or even promoted by moral justice (in the eyes of the perpetrator), and it is not held accountable by laws and regulations.

It seems like from a time period, television began to change the content and meaning of public discourse, news became taken out of context due to the need to attract attention, and news reporting became a tool of those in power. A Bristol landlord wrongly linked to the murder of Joanna Yates four years ago has said he was devastated to see his arrest re-created after he was invited to the set of an upcoming ITV drama by the producers. The tabloids portray him as a "perverted voyeur who feeds my sexual appetite with teaching". Christopher Jeffries has been subjected to unprecedented media attention and vilification during the investigation into the murder of Joanna Yates, and he has been the victim of a very serious injustice perpetrated by a large body of the press. Through this incident, it is even more noteworthy that cyber violence is trespassing the jurisdiction of the rule of law and moral order, and the parties are directly tried. This is the unavoidable dissolution and bankruptcy of order in an information society, because it only takes a few words for a person to be condemned without democracy.

Of course, any movement that plays a positive role in social development will involve sacrifices, but such sacrifices should be voluntary sacrifices made by the parties concerned, sacrifices made willingly to promote progress, or transfers made by the original privilege holders. To be more specific, the movements in this essay are those that lead with positive influences and promote social progress. For example, Queen Elizabeth I is arguably the most outstanding monarch in history because she made England a major naval power in the world. Or Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, who wrote the Declaration of Independence that influenced the development of the United States. Whereas cyber violence is not a kind of positive advancement, which is being forced to sacrifice innocent people under the oppression of the beneficiaries of the movement. If the protection of vulnerable groups needs to be forced to produce new vulnerable groups, and the price of equal rights efforts is that they are built on another kind of injustice and generate another kind of equal rights demand, then this kind of equal rights can only be a kind of disclosure- The privilege of rationalizing the cloak of justice with equal rights. Similarly, some powerful individuals in the vulnerable groups, under the guise of speaking for the vulnerable groups, obtain the benefits given to them by the society. Under such circumstances, vulnerable individuals are  finding it difficult to get effective protection. This is because the offending people use the excuse of defending their own victims' rights, so their online comments, or cyberbullying, become morally rationalized, and the people they think are bad can't fight back, they have to endure, thus creating new victims.

Overall, any guilt should be punished by the law, and the public has the power to challenge the trial only after the judicial department has convicted the suspect. Although it is the right of every person to speak up, they have no right to judge and punish them directly. In the era of Internet information explosion and "We Media", where everyone can become a voice channel, people are more in need of the most basic facts and form judgments based on their own independent thinking, rather than giving the initiative of thinking to media commentators and emotional opinions. Focus on defense and develop a skill for listening to both sides of a story, even if it pains.  Realize virtually every source wants a story told as he or she sees it. That means even seemingly good, honest people can tell just the facts that support their own biased point of view, sometimes leaving out key details.

Bibliography

[1]THE FREE DICTIONARY OF FAELEX, Presumption of Innocence

legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Presumption+of+Innocence

[2]Penguin Random House, "On Crimes and Punishments" ,

penguinrandomhouse.com/books/286337/crime-and-punishment-by-fyodor-dostoyevsky-translated-with-an-introduction-and-notes-by-david-mcduff-illustrated-by-coralie-bickford-smith/9780241347683/readers-guide/

[3]Bill Belsey, teacher of the Education Bureau of Beifeng District, Northwest Territories, Cyberbullying

[4]BBC News, 10 January 2018, “Akubra girl Dolly's bullying suicide shocks Australia”, bbc.com/news/world-australia-42631208

[5]CHINA SCIENCE COMMUNICATION

baike.baidu.com/item/we media /829414?fr=aladdin

[6]The Guardian, Fri 28 Nov 2014, Christopher Jefferies speaks of pain at seeing TV recreation of his arrest

theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/nov/29/christopher-jefferies-tv-joanna-yeates-murder

[7]Raphael Cohen-Almagor, 06 June 2017, Balancing Freedom of Expression and Social Responsibility on the Internet

link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11406-017-9856-6