Cassandra Sharp: Cancelled by Consensus - Social Media and Legality

When a gunman live-streamed a massacre in Christchurch, the world didn't just watch — it judged. In real time. In hashtags. And when Amber Heard and Justin Baldoni became the internet's most recent defendants, millions of people delivered a verdict before a single court date. We now live in an age where justice doesn't wait for judges. It happens in comment sections, in retweets, in pile-ons — verdicts reached by consensus, not by law.

What does it mean for the young people growing up inside that machine, absorbing their first lessons in right and wrong not from a courtroom, but from a comment thread?

That's what we're getting into today.

My guest is Cassandra Sharp, Professor of Law at the University of Wollongong and author of the book, Hashtag Jurisprudence. Drawing on case studies of terrorist attacks between 2014 and 2018, her book examines how ordinary people use social media to process terror, express outrage, and — crucially — construct their own theories of justice outside formal legal institutions. She calls this "hashtag jurisprudence": the everyday, emotional, narrative-driven sense of law and justice that plays out online, often in tension with — and sometimes in direct defiance of — the formal legal system.