Essay Draft 1

Human flesh engine, a powerful product of social media in China. It is not the traditional searching engine like Google or Bing, but collaborative efforts to share information online.. It was first appeared as the name of a forum on Mop.com - a discussion website popular in China. Internet users can post and answer various questions on it. The first flesh search was the kitten-killer incidence in 2006. Internet users use this kind of search engine to pursue the justice and dig out the truth in the real life. Due to the increasing use of the flesh search engine ,many of the ordinary citizens are also got attacked. Because of that, People's congress of Zhejiang province has already made it a prosecutable crime for Internet user to publish the address and private activities of anyone without their permission. Furthermore, there should be more education about privacy issues on the Internet users as well.

Internet users arise a flesh search in order to correct some actions they deem wrong,but ordinary citizens are also deeply affected by being falsely accused of actions they do not commit. On the social media platform, flesh search this sleuthing process involves the probing and posting of personal details in pursuit of romance,kinship,justice or vindication. Citizens are exposed to the deluge of home and email address,bank statements and other private information. Sometimes, the exposed information does not belong to the person under "search". Innocent people have got attacked by those angry, dissatisfied and unaware Internet users. Take an example of Yin Feng, a part time taxi driver. Internet users posted a news about a taxi driver, who rolled down his window to spit on an elderly homeless person lying on the street. Witnesses recorded the first digits of the spitter's number plate and began to flesh search it. Through the flesh search engine, Internet users put their eyes on Yin, whose number plates partially matched, and some anonymous users posted his mobile number online. Numerous callers berated innocent Yin, screaming obscenities. As other private information such as ID number,  home address and even relatives phone number were also posted, Yin even got threatened by those callers. There are a lot of persons facing the same situation as Yin. Their daily life were dramatically disturbed and their reputations were also ruined. Ordinary people begin to scare human flesh search engines and against it. 

In order to preserve the right of online users, some parts of China has polished some protection laws to against the human flesh search engine. In 2010, "Zhejiang Province's Informatization Promotion Regulations(Draft)" stated that "any unit or individual must not publish,distribute,delete,or edit another's related information without permission". The State Council office also published a white paper on "The State of China's Internet",which indicated that Chinese citizens would receive protections under the law for online free speech(1). Chinese government tried to use law to crack down the flesh search. However, it seems that it was not working well. According to the online research conducted by the Renmin Net, over 90% of the Internet users were against the ban of flesh search(2). Internet users thought that flesh search was an effective way for the public, especially the ordinary citizens, to supervise the government officers and expose their corruption actions.Through the collective work of online users, a lot of prodigal behaviours of officers are exposed. In this way, people are unwilling to give up this useful tool, even if they face the same risks of information leakage. Furthermore, many of the Internet users are anonymous when they share information online. This results the difficulties of tracking them for the prosecutions. People will also avoid the troublesome of suing attackers when the influence is in the small scale.

Another move to reduce the damages that bring by the flesh search engine is the education and the restraints on the online users themselves. After seeing many ordinary people are getting attacked, Internet users are voluntary listing some rules about flesh search, called "8 Flesh Search Self-discipline"(3). This is an essential action to produce an orderly online environment.In the self-discipline, online users try not to search the private information about someone and use the flesh search engine as a mutual helping platform instead of satisfying self-interests. Instead of law regulations, this kind of self-discipline improves the reliability of shared information and try to use the search engine on a right way. It is the ideal online environment if every online users are following this kind of rules, making full use of flesh search engine. However,there are still some selfish users disrupt the correct use of flesh search engine and also abuse the shared information.It will be a long way to make sure that the flesh search engine is an helpful in people's life, instead of a sharp sword hurting innocent people.

All in all, it is hard to solve the problems that human flesh search engine brought about in the short run. There will are innocent people still getting attacked by this flesh search. Despite the established laws and self-discipline rasied by responsible online users are trying to protect them, a lot more attention should also be paid on this kind of search.



(1)http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/06/human-flesh-search-engines-identity-crisis/
(2)http://www.infosec.org.cn/news/news_view.php?newsid=1721
(3)http://www.lawtime.cn/info/xingfa/xfnews/2010082559009.html