Human Flesh Search Engine
Digital and social media are used to hunt for personal demographic or geographical information of social deviants, often with the shared intention to expose, shame, and punish them to reinstate legal justice or public morality.
On the Chinese version of Wikipedia, "flesh search" refers to a mass movement of finding out personal information or truths behind particular events.
It uses the Internet as a medium and gathers information partly through human labor to differentiate true and false sources, and partly via information provided by anonymous insiders. The qualifier ‘flesh’ indicates the important role of human intervention, which is distinct from conventional, algorithm-based, mechanical searches.
(http://zh.wikipedia.org, translation by Cheong and Gong, 2010.)
(http://zh.wikipedia.org, translation by Cheong and Gong, 2010.)