Condemnation Without Assertion: Distributed Responsibility and the Generation of Self-Preserving Condemnation in Japanese Social Media Firestorms

This deposit contains both the English version and the original Japanese version of the paper: Condemnation Without Assertion: Distributed Responsibility and the Generation of Self-Preserving Condemnation in Japanese Social Media Firestorms This paper examines a structural feature of social media firestorms in which no single participant fully assumes responsibility for a strong accusation, while the aggregate interaction nevertheless produces an effect equivalent to collective condemnation. The paper calls this phenomenon “condemnation without assertion.” Rather than treating online firestorms merely as products of misinformation, moral outrage, polarization, or majority illusion, the paper develops a dynamic model of how condemnation can preserve itself by changing the grounds on which it is justified over time. The analysis introduces and connects a series of concepts, including pseudo-independent convergence, normative compression, pseudo-empiricalization of social common sense, normativization of subjective thresholds of consideration, pooling of normative legitimacy, motivational opacity, issue proliferation, asymmetry of intervention costs, non-consensual public-debate formation, shifting verification thresholds, conversion of procedural lag into suspicion, participatory closure, the temporal disadvantage of clarification, asymmetric narrative closure, and retrospective legitimation through fault. The central claim is that these mechanisms need not operate independently. When connected sequentially, the output of one stage can become the input of the next, allowing condemnation to become partially independent of the original factual proposition. Even when the initial suspicion is weakened or disproved, the normative basis of criticism may shift toward manners, attitude, silence, procedural delay, or attributed fault. The paper describes this integrated process as a self-preserving condemnation model. Special attention is given to short evaluative expressions such as the Japanese phrase futsuu ni shitsurei de wa? (“Isn’t that just rude?”). Such expressions may compress heterogeneous subjective reactions, contextual assumptions, and thresholds of expected consideration into what appears to be a homogeneous normative judgment. The paper therefore argues that visible agreement on social media should not automatically be treated as evidence that participants share the same proposition, justification, context, normative threshold, or motivation. The paper also distinguishes between problem resolution and participatory closure. Participants may experience their involvement in a controversy as complete after receiving social feedback, observing a response from the target, or seeing the controversy subside, even though the underlying factual or institutional issue remains unresolved. This can contribute to a temporal asymmetry in which the original accusation reaches a larger audience than later clarification, while provisional narratives remain in social memory. The broader philosophical problem concerns distributed responsibility. Individual contributions may be weak, heterogeneous, or difficult to aggregate into a single intentional act, while the reputational, procedural, and temporal consequences borne by the target remain concentrated. In this sense, the paper develops the following central formulation: Responsibility may be distributed, but consequences are not. The Japanese version included in this deposit is the original-language text. The English version is a full translation intended to preserve the conceptual structure, terminology, argumentative sequence, and formal notation of the Japanese original. Files included English version: Condemnation Without Assertion: Distributed Responsibility and the Generation of Self-Preserving Condemnation in Japanese Social Media Firestorms Japanese original: 断言なき断罪――日本のSNS炎上における分散責任と自己保存的非難の生成 Suggested keywords social media; online public shaming; digital vigilantism; distributed responsibility; collective condemnation; normative compression; participatory closure; moral outrage; social media firestorms; online discourse; public accountability; reputational harm; Japanese social media; philosophy of social media; social ontology