4 Surprising Ways Internet Mobs Were Used For Justice

Obviously, we don't know what Way was thinking when she announced her hit-and-run via social media, but it was probably something along the lines of "Look at this good joke I made" and "Hashtags are still funny, right?" Her handful of readers disagreed and reported her to the police.

Now, here's where things get interesting. The biker that Way hit never intended to report the incident, apparently because he didn't want to worry his girlfriend. So this dummy would have never been caught if she hadn't thought the whole episode was tweet-worthy.

Now, the important thing to remember here is that the point of Davis' whole day was to keep the Senate from letting the bill get to vote. If she could keep the filibuster going until midnight, the special session would end and everyone would go home without shutting down most of the Lone Star State's abortion clinics. But as midnight approached, the capitol building erupted in mayhem: All 30 of Texas' liberals showed up to cheer Davis on, turning the entire floor of the Senate into a chaotic Crazy Town. In the midst of the hoopin' and hollerin', the Senate actually passed the bill after all. "Boo!" said everybody.

EXCEPT not really. Within a few hours of the bill's passage, insiders began publishing pictures of a timestamp change. At first, the official record reflected that the vote was taken on Wednesday, after the session should have ended. A few hours later, the official record said the vote was taken on Tuesday, so Davis' filibuster was useless. Either Texas got itself a time machine or someone was messing with the official record.

Texas State Senate

Thanks to the Internet's collective outrage, the bill was stricken and Texas legislators were shamed into oblivion. (Well, not really. The whole thing was passed less than a month later.)

Police then arrested the man. And because his comments were also global (change your Facebook settings, guys), the Internet proceeded to spam him with articles of the mugging, one of them helping him along the path to jail, linking a Prison Bitch Name Generator:

Facebook
Soreass Mantits, we assume.

Granted, it was posted on the /b/ section of 4chan, so we can't entirely blame users for not taking the threat very seriously in between threads of naked women and newfags. (For those of you who don't know 4chan, just think of Reddit with less superiority complex and more tits.)

But 10 days later, it happened again on 4chan, with a poster from the Netherlands claiming that he would shoot his "Dutch teacher and as many students" as he could, "at a school in the Dutch city of Leiden." For more proof, the poster said he would "be using a 9mm Colt Defender." The poster also claimed that he was using a proxy, and therefore the police would not find him before tomorrow.

Rahman Roslan / Getty
A proxy is like a mask, but with Internet.

4chan users quickly reported the threat to the authorities. Schools in the area were shut down the next day, and police sought the hidden source of the threat. But because hiding your identity from the Internet is like hiding from water in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the would-be shooter was found and arrested. The unnamed man turned out to be a dropout who had previously been expelled from a certain school in Leiden for unruly behavior, meaning, yes, the anons on 4chan just saved a handful of lives.

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