The owner of a fried food shop in New Taipei City on Friday last week called the police when a young man with Down syndrome could not pay NT$40 for a meal he ordered. The incident quickly went viral online, after the man’s mother wrote about it on Facebook, drawing criticism that escalated over the week, eventually resulting in a backlash against all parties.
The mother said the shop owner yelled at her son for forgetting to bring cash, and immediately called the police, leaving her son trembling and confused. According to her version of events, when she confronted the owner about the incident, he told her he did not care about his disability and did not have to time to talk about it.
Soon after the story took off on social media, the shop received thousands of one-star reviews on Google, accusing the owner of lacking empathy. The shop was listed as “permanently closed” by Sunday.
The owner released a statement through a friend, saying that he received hundreds of hateful calls, doxxing attempts and was publicly shamed for two days, to the point that he had to see a doctor and take sedatives. He asked people to stop leaving comments online threatening his life. The police precinct that responded to the call from the shop owner said the customer did not respond when they tried to explain the situation to him. A person posting on the popular Dcard forum on Tuesday, who claimed to have witnessed the incident, said that they, the shop owner, a worker and two police officers did not know that the man had Down syndrome, and had assumed that he was trying to avoid paying.
The incident took a turn with people saying the fallout had gone too far when locals reported receiving flyers in the mail from the mother talking about the incident. The flyers depicted the owner as bullying her son and causing him to experience “the scariest night of his life.” The mother on Tuesday wrote on Facebook that she had distributed the flyers hoping to find witnesses to the incident. She said that the resulting “cyberbullying has left me physically and emotionally exhausted.” She later deleted all her posts about the incident. On Wednesday, her beauty workshop was inundated with one-star reviews on Google, its name was maliciously changed and it was later marked “permanently closed.”
While the store owner might have been impatient and unaware of the customer’s special needs, and the mother was also aggressive in dismissing the incident as bullying, this was probably not the first time she experienced something like this, which made her feel she needed to call attention to the situation and demand some sort of social justice. Consequently, both sides fell victim to doxxing and cyberbullying.
It might be easy to hide behind a screen and shame strangers, believing it is an act of justice to hold “wrongdoers” accountable, but people need to recognize that these stories are often more complicated and their actions risk making matters worse. The effects of online bullying can be destructive for the people involved, and it is a disproportionate punishment handed out without giving anyone a chance to defend themself.
While cyberactivism can be positive and effective when calling out clear-cut crimes, this incident shows that it is easy to cross the line into cyberbullying. People must refrain from knee-jerk reactions, and instead listen, take the time to understand a situation and engage in productive conversations if they want to move beyond outrage from single incidents and effect positive change in society.
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