In an article for Justia, authors Lawrence Friedman and Joanna Grossman use the recent alt-right rally in Charlottesville to demonstrate how the personal anonymity once felt in a crowd is a lost concept in today's society. The report shows how crowdsourcing efforts on Twitter to identity, expose and shame members of the rally reinforce the new reality of the privacy in the public space. While some participants were correctly identified and have realized social repercussions, others were wrongly identified as participating in the rally and have suffered unnecessarily. The authors also wonder if some of the alt-right protesters ought to be allowed to learn and grow past their prejudices, but argue “the computer age is a deadly threat to any right to be forgotten,” adding, “American law ignores, on the whole, the right to forget, and to be forgotten.”
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