Comment by qualeed

>Living life treating everyone as guilty until they prove themselves innocent is... just shitty

There's no scenario here where this guy is innocent. The distinction here is whether he's a wife-beating drug dealer or just a drug dealer. There's some evidence to suggest the former but not really enough that you can definitely state it.

Personally, I'd give a convicted drug dealer less benefit of the doubt than the average person.

On one hand, I agree that internet comments tend to judge people unfairly, and “treating people as guilty first” probably leads to an unhealthy society (considered “unhealthy” by its own members).

On the other hand, GP is objectively right ("innocent until proven guilty doesn't extend to internet comments"). I also think that it’s better for random people to be able to post their terrible judgements than any feasible alternative, because such an alternative probably leads to good judgements also censored. We can mitigate (not eliminate) bad judgements, e.g. by educating people better and shaming those who shame others more; and we can minimize mob justice’s effect on critical government functions like welfare and prison sentencing, e.g. by running them on mostly objective procedures and with staff who aren’t influenced by mob opinion.

Targeted harassment and doxxing (and swatting, getting people fired/divorced/ruined when they don’t deserve to be, etc.) is different (and to be clear, IMO very bad). People posting opinions in a way that the target can block (which they can usually do with blocklists and word filters) is fine. The main point I’m trying to make is: if opinions in random internet comments lead to targeted harassment and real-world consequences even when the opinions are “bad” (e.g. bigoted, hypocritical), it's less effective to try and prevent the internet comments' existence, than to reduce the factors causing them to influence the real world and create factors preventing influence.

The point is that people should be able to use their own judgement on a wide variety of issues and not be forced to delegate their decision making power to the courts/third parties.

There's a difference between "we want to lock this person up and take away their liberty, so we should be basically certain" versus "look man he's been done for drugs and she ended up with a broken arm, I don't trust this person".

Why? Different fora have different standards of proof. For example, in civil cases (even in America) the standard of proof is 'preponderance of evidence', not 'innocent until proven guilty'.

Why should internet comments follow criminal law, and not eg civil law, or some other standard?

Yes, it is. The courts are flawed, the courts get things wrong all the time. Many innocent people are found guilty. If we must apply the legal standard to internet comments, must we condemn people we believe to be innocent? The legal standards exist for the system, not for people. Saying that the standard of "innocent until proven guilty" should apply outside of the legal system is lazy and avoiding making decisions for yourself about how you treat people.

People proven guilty are not necessarily guilty. People proven not guilty are not necessarily innocent. The legal standard exists because a system needs standards.

unfortunately the average quality of thought process of hn when it comes to life and common sense is the opposite of its technical knowledge