A few weeks ago, you couldn’t flip through TV channels without a wall-to-wall coverage about Jasleen Kaur and Sarvjeet Singh. If you’ve been in the mountains and disconnected, the brief story is that Jasleen Kaur took a picture of Sarvjeet Singh on his bike and put up a status update on Facebook alleging that Sarvjeet had made obscene remarks about her on the road, and that she reported him to the police station.

The post went viral, the police gave a cash reward to Jasleen and Arvind Kejriwal, the chief minister of Delhi, congratulated her. Soon after witnesses came forward and said Jasleen’s post was inaccurate; that an argument broke out between Jasleen and Sarvjeet, but there was no sexual harrasment. The social media pendulum then swung back against Jasleen Kaur. India Today has a more detailed synopsis of the case.

Welcome to the new world of social media justice that can go wrong. Or is it really any different from the “real old world justice”? Even in the real world justice system, there are plenty of cases that do not quite work the way they are supposed to. Here are a few examples. (A more detailed list is available on Kodig.)

Central Park Five: In 1989, five teens aged 14-16 were arrested and each confessed on videotape to the crime of attacking and raping a jogger in Central Park, New York and implicated each other. Later, it turned out that another person had actually committed the crime.

Guildford Four: In 1974, four people were falsely convicted of pub bombings in Guildford, and then released when it was found that they had nothing to do with it. This was the basis of the critically acclaimed film, In the Name of the Father, starring Daniel Day Lewis.

West Memphis Three: In 1994, three men were tried and convicted as teenagers of murdering three boys in West Memphis, Arkansas, in 1993. DNA evidence later proved inconclusive and they are still fighting to prove their innocence.

A common theme across all these cases was that there was a sense of public outrage against these incidents; the “person on the street” was baying for the blood of the accused. These past examples show that given enough public pressure, the real world justice system (the police, public prosecutors, the judge and the jury) sometimes ignore evidence to follow the public mood and extract false confessions or do whatever it takes to get a conviction.

The outrage that drove those miscarriages of justice in real world is the same outrage that drives social media justice. Except that on social media the effect is magnified with a photo or video clicked on a cell phone that can instantly go “viral” and do “justice” even before a court of law conducts an inquiry. On the other hand, the mobile phone with the inbuilt video camera has become the greatest instrument for justice of the past 100 years. All you need to do is capture a moment of gross injustice and share it to get authorities to take notice. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) even has a “mobile justice” app for people to take videos and share it with them so they could follow up with relevant authorities.

So, while mobile phones and social media have been a huge benefit, the false positive rates may also be higher because the standards for examination and due process are lower. A false positive is an error in an evaluation process in which a condition tested for is mistakenly found to have been detected. This could happen when diagnostic tools mistakenly say you have breast cancer or when legitimate email from your wife is mistakenly classified as spam because it has the words “buy viagra” in it.  However, the stakes of false positives in the justice system are extremely high. A famous expression by English Jurist William Blackstone came up with this formulation on the justice system’s false positives: “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”

Since we are the judge, the jury as well as the executioner in social media justice, let us keep Blackstone’s formulation in mind and think very hard when we see a perceived injustice on our favourite social network: another person’s life depends on our shares, likes, comments, retweets and hashtags.