BLAME REORIENTATION IN DIGITAL MORAL JUDGEMENT: REDISTRIBUTING MORAL ATTENTION IN A VIRAL FACEBOOK CONTROVERSY

Abstract

Public responses to minor transgressions increasingly unfold in digital environments where both the initial act and its public circulation become open to collective judgement. Although research on online shaming and digital vigilantism has documented patterns of condemnation, less is known about how evaluative attention shifts between alleged wrongdoing and its exposure, and how these shifts shape the allocation of blame. This study examined how moral responsibility was negotiated in public responses to a widely circulated Facebook video involving a woman accused of attempting to steal a sachet of Milo. An initial corpus of 3,200 Facebook items was screened, yielding 2,200 substantive items for analysis. Reflexive thematic analysis, supported by NVivo Version 15, generated 40 open codes, 12 conceptual categories, and seven empirical themes. Moral judgement was not confined to the alleged minor theft but extended to the circumstances surrounding the woman, the decision to record and share the incident, and concerns about humiliation, exposure, proportionality, and digital ethics. Interpretations of hardship and vulnerability often softened judgements of the alleged offender, whereas recording and publicly sharing the incident were more readily treated as intentional actions warranting scrutiny. Compassion, discomfort, condemnation, and ethical concerns frequently coexisted in audience responses. These patterns informed the development of blame reorientation, describing how evaluative attention is redistributed across actors, actions, and circumstances within a contested digital event. The findings suggest that online moral judgement can move beyond an initial transgression as audiences reconsider who or what should bear responsibility.