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Thanks to social media, judges have lost their monopoly on matters of guilt and innocence. Most of us now make moral decisions about public figures not on the basis of legal decrees or priestly edicts, but on the crowdsourced judgment of our peer group, as expressed through social media. Fired UBC creative writing chair Steven Galloway provides perhaps the best example of this phenomenon: An investigation commissioned by his own university showed that he’d done nothing provably wrong except have a consensual affair with a student. But thousands of people call him a monster on social media — for no other reason than that this has become the fashionable view among their social media contacts.

In the professional sphere, these crowdsourced judgments are just as enforceable as formal legal injunctions. Even if there are theatre-industry players who privately come to believe that Schultz is genuinely contrite, that he is a reformed man, and that he deserves a second chance, they would be loath to act on that impulse — because it would attract the collective opprobrium of Twitter and Facebook.

There is something strange about a world in which a convicted murderer can get a second chance, but not someone who is accused of workplace harassment or sexual abuse

Well and good, many would say: Crowdsourcing brings an extra layer of accountability to accused sexual predators. But there is something strange about a world in which a convicted murderer can get a second chance — but not someone who is accused of workplace harassment or sexual abuse.

The #MeToo movement is a one-way system of justice: With a few Tweets, it can serve to forever stigmatize a man as guilty; but it can never restore his reputation if he turns out to be innocent. #MeToo can deliver infamy, but never absolution. There is no judge, no court, no Archdiocese to which one can plead the case for review, pardon or parole.