When you broken down to it’s simplest form, Social Justice takes place through the use of “gripe sites”. Websites built for the purpose of complaining about a business or person have been coined by the name “Gripe Site.” It’s one of those phrases that just happened, and it does make sense because these type of websites do “gripe” about something. While the concept is similar to that of Social Justice we just felt the need to re-define these types of website with a term that represents a more positive tone than “gripe” hence “Social Justice.” There are many gripe sites already in existence, and in many cases are exactly what we aim to accomplish with Social Justice, the problem with calling them gripe sites is the term has developed a bad connotation associated with it. This happened because some of these gripe sites were created just out of spite, or for the sole purpose of causing damage to another person or company resulting in a backlash from the Internet community.
Here are some examples of existing well known Gripe Sites:
mitsubishisucks.com
complaintslist.com
chase-sucks.com
screw-paypal.com
scam-detector.com
ripoffreport.com
Some of these sample sites go a bit beyond what we are hoping to see with Social Justice websites, particularly in the domain names the use of words like “sucks” and “screw” only help further the believe that these type of “gripe” sites are done purely out of spite rather than to inform and empower the public. A preferable domain name choice might be:
ChaseBankRippedMeOff.com – which is a more definitive statement and then the site itself could go on to explain what exactly Chase did and why others should be careful in order to avoid a similar situation happening to them.
By redefining these types of websites as Social Justice and excluding the ones that are done for the wrong reasons which we will happily leave as being called “gripe sites”, we can change the impression of what purpose they serve.
A Social Justice website should not be built for the sole purpose of doing harm, but rather to warn other people of illegal, immoral, unethical, or dishonest practices done by people or companies. By limiting Social Justice websites to cases where harm has actually been caused and the website owner or publisher is simple telling a true story hopefully the public will come to know Social Justice as a beneficial, and even desired type of site. Some may argue that this is like taking the law into your own hands, and that may be true to a point. We aren’t advocating violence though, we are simply promoting the idea that the people help each other by warning others of potential danger. It happens every day already, and I don’t think anyone would argue against one personal saying to another, “Don’t go to X company, I bought a widget from them and paid cash, when the widget arrived it was broken and X would not replace or fix it.” People do this everyday in conversation about all sorts of issues, the problem is if you don’t know of anyone who had this experience you have know way of knowing that company X is not reputable. But through Social Justice, if you were able to search in Google for “Company X” and you found a website from this customer which explained what happened to them you would certainly not go to this company, or at a minimum you would do more research on them.
So in sum, a properly running Social Justice network of websites would have no downside, not to the public, nor to reputable business’s.