Mens rea, wrongdoing and digital advocacy in social media: Exploring quasi‐legal narratives during #deleteuber boycott

• Published date: 01 December 2022
• Author: Laura Illia,Elanor Colleoni,Kiron Ranvidran,Nuccio Ludovico
• Date: 01 December 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/pa.2805

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Mens rea, wrongdoing and digital advocacy in social media:

Exploring quasi-legal narratives during #deleteuber boycott

Laura Illia

1

| Elanor Colleoni

2

| Kiron Ranvidran

3

| Nuccio Ludovico

4

1

Department of Communication and Media

Research, University of Fribourg, Faculty of

Management, Economics and Social Science,

Fribourg, Switzerland

2

Department of Business, Law, Economics and

Consumer Behaviour, IULM University, Faculty

of Communication, Milan, Italy

3

Department of Information and System

Technology, IE University, IE Business School,

Madrid, Spain

4

Department of Integrated Research on

Energy, Environment and Society, University

of Groningen, Faculty of Science and

Engineering, AB, Groningen, Netherlands

Correspondence

Laura Illia, Department of Communication and

Media Research, University of Fribourg,

Faculty of Management, Economics and Social

Science, Boulevard de Pérolles 90, 1700

Fribourg, Switzerland.

Email: laura.illia@unifr.ch

Funding information

Fundaci

on BBVA

#Boycotts represent digital advocacy attempts in which users publicly punish an

organization as a lurata (i.e., jury), which assesses the guilty intent, the mens rea

(i.e., guilty mind), from a set of visible acts, the actus reus (i.e., wrongdoings). Yet, we

know little about the quasi-legal narratives advocated by users. To this aim, we devel-

oped a mixed method study of the #deleteuber boycott on Twitter. Our findings sug-

gest that while users advocate both an Uber-specific and a shared mens rea of Uber

with sharing economy firms or the tech giants of Silicon Valley, the latter narrative is

the most prominent one; its use depends on whether users are part of a lurata of

influencers or not. These findings provide a contribution to studies on public affairs

that focus on online activism, boycotts in social media and digital advocacy because

they increase our understanding of the opaque legal motivations that provoke boy-

cotters. Also, they highlight that social media blurs the boundaries between boycotts

directed at the firm from the boycotts arising indirectly due to the shameful acts of

the industry or peers.

KEYWORDS

#Boycott, actus reus, digital advocacy, lurata,mens rea, sharing economy, social media, Uber

1|INTRODUCTION

“If Uber's Culture Is to Change, the CEO Must Go

#recruitment #wearefunction”(tweet #2164)

“Uber has a sexism problem, and so does Silicon Valley”

(tweet #2224)

“Taxi convoy now at Parliament as drivers protest, Uber reg-

ulation industry reform introduced in Vic. #sharingeconomy”

(tweet #1848)

The quotations above exemplify different narratives used during

the #deleteuber boycott advocating that Uber is a bad company and

deserves to be sanctioned. The first argues that Uber has a toxic

culture because of its CEO. The second asserts that Uber is bad

because it promotes the sexist culture that is typical of other Silicon

Valley technological giants. And the third stresses that Uber being part

of the sharing economy is seen as unregulated unlike the taxi services.

Though at first glance these narratives may represent similar advocat-

ing message strategies against Uber with regards to different sort of

organizational misconducts (Roulet, 2020), in reality, they attribute

nuanced quasi-legal perspective, as they discuss slightly different

levels of mens rea of Uber, namely an organization-specific means rea,

and a shared mens rea among firms that belong to the sharing econ-

omy or technological giants of the Silicon Valley.

Mens rea (Alicke, 2000; LaFave, 2000) is a concept that comes

from criminal law (Gardner, 1993). It refers to the following principle:

“actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea”(an act does not make one

guilty unless his mind is guilty) (Gardner, 1993, p. 636). It derives that

Received: 25 November 2020 Revised: 26 July 2021 Accepted: 13 December 2021

DOI: 10.1002/pa.2805

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium,

provided the original work is properly cited.

© 2022 The Authors. Journal of Public Affairs published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

J Public Affairs. 2022;22(Suppl. 1):e2805. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pa 1of16

https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.2805

when a narrative about an organizational wrongdoing emerges there

are typically two stories (Godfrey et al., 2009): one about the egre-

giousness of the actus reus (i.e., the guilty act), and the second about

the gravity of mens rea (i.e., the guilty mind or intent behind the act).

The latter is typically paired with the gravity of the punishment that

the organization receives. The guilty intent suggests that the actor

“intended, knew and should have known when (he) acted”

(Rosenfield, 2008, p. 1842). Also, a mens rea attracts not only disap-

proval but also stigma associated with criminality (Roulet, 2020).

Extant research on boycotts (e.g., Balabanis, 2013; Hon, 2015;

Ibrahim, 2019; Kang, 2012; Kanol & Nat, 2017; Liew et al., 2013;

Makarem & Haeran, 2016) has primarily focused on analyzing how

boycotters (digitally) advocate for a narrative related to actus reus.

Few studies have analyzed the narrative of the equally important

mens rea. This is surprising since the evaluation of a mens rea consti-

tutes the core of a boycott given that users carry out an evaluation

akin to that of a trial jury in court (Balabanis, 2013): that is, the more

the company displays a mens rea in a misconduct, the more it is likely

to be put in the public pillory. Balabanis (2013) points to a further

nuance in that those boycotters initiating an indirect boycott may

advocate not only for an organization-specific mens rea (i.e., the orga-

nization should have known it was wrong but did it), but also for a

shared-mens rea (i.e., the company should have known it was wrong

as others in the industry are disapproved for this, but did it). A third

and important element in the link between an actus reus and the boy-

cott is the role of the boycotter. It is the public jury, the lurata, that

infers the mens rea from the actus reus. The lurata is influenced by

public opinion, public discourse and their own reference points.

Therefore, it is likely that differences in the lurata can affect how they

attribute mens rea and which actus reus they consider graver in their

mental calculus.

Given that the narrative of mens rea has been relatively

unexplored yet play a c rucial role is social advocacy, we develop a

study about the rather qu asi-legal motivation of boycotters, in par-

ticular their narrative with regards to the guilty act in committing a

misconduct. Specifica lly, How is mens rea digitally advocated durin g a

boycott? Do boycotter s advocate for an organization-specific me ns rea,

a shared mens rea, or bot h? Are boycotters homogenous or is ther e vari-

ety here?

Extant research in public affairs that focus on online activism sug-

gests that the disruptive impact of boycotts has been amplified by the

diffusion of digital networks. Online, boycotters can easily organize

and mobilize masses against corporate misbehavior (Den Hond & De

Bakker, 2007; Illia, 2003; Shah et al., 2019; Yuksel et al., 2019). Not

only does social media enable new forms of political advocacy

(Figenschou & Fredheim, 2019) but also allow potentially anybody to

exert a certain level of social control (Barclay et al., 2011) on corpora-

tions through community-building. That is, anybody—not just a con-

sumer association or an NGO—may mobilize masses that shame

organizations and punish the company publicly. This democratization

of justice via an online public jury adopting quasi-legal narratives

becomes even more significant considering various new business

models, such as that of sharing economy, function in a regulatory

limbo and thus may not be within the jurisdiction of a purely legal reg-

ulator (Brady et al., 2015; Kanol & Nat, 2017). This has given birth to

a new type of digital advocacy further enabled by the rise of social

networks (Den Hond & De Bakker, 2007), that can be defined as “an

(act of) organized public effort, (…) in which civic initiators or sup-

porters use digital media”(Edwards et al., 2013).

We draw on extant literature on digital advocacy to analyze how

intentionalityof an organization is judged by itsaudiences (e.g., Ding &

Wu, 2014;Godfrey,2005; Godfrey et al.,2009). Though these studies

have concentratedtheir efforts on examining how the reputational cap-

ital built up priorto a misconduct allows the attributionof good, rather

than bad intentionality (Ding & Wu, 2014;Godfrey,2005), their theo-

rizing is usefulto set the conceptual basis of our study.

We conduct a mixed methods study design (Caliandro &

Grandini, 2016; Creswell, 2003,2013; Greene & Caracelli, 2003;

Plano Clark et al., 2013) of the #deleteuber boycott, using Twitter

data. This boycott was launched in Twitter against Uber during the

first weeks of 2017, when Uber drivers continued to provide airport-

ride services despite the Travel Ban strikes at U.S. airports

(Wong, 2017a). Even though Uber clarified that its actions were not

intentional (Lynley, 2017), the boycott caused Uber to lose 200,000

customers, at least temporarily, when they uninstalled the app

(Flynn, 2017).

Our exploratory study shows 12 distinct actus reus that appear in

the rich collection of tweets in our data set. Further, boycotters' nar-

ratives indicate that the organization is not only a malevolent trans-

gressor per se but also because a malevolent accomplice to a

transgression, that is, there exists an organization specific mens rea

and a shared one. Moreover, we see that digital advocates that are

influencers—compared those that are part of the common population

on Twitter—tend to punish Uber publicly because of its shared men

rea with other Tech giants of the Silicon Valley.

We offer two specific contributions to the literature on public

affairs that focus on online activism and boycotts (Albrecht

et al., 2013; Balabanis, 2013; Braunsberger & Buckler, 2010;

Illia, 2003;John&Klein,2003; Kanol & Nat, 2017; Makarem &

Haeran, 2016;Shahetal.,2019;Yukseletal.,2019). Closely exam-

ining the 12 topics discussed on Twitter, we see that there are at

least two legalistic narratives—that is, organizational-specific versus

shared mens rea—behind a boycott which blur the difference

between a direct and indirect boycott. Second, they suggest that

there are two lurata—that is, juries—advocating for boycotts that

are linked to the degree of influence of users. Taken together we

can say that our contributions include both theoretical and method-

ological contributions to the literature on social advocacy and pub-

lic affairs.

The paper is structured as follows: We first present scholarly

work on online boycotts and discuss the attribution of mens rea during

boycotts. We then present the #deleteuber boycott and illustrate the

three explorative steps of analysis within our study. After expounding

the main results, we present our emerging theoretical model and dis-

cuss the implications of the findings about shared mens rea for public

affairs studies.

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