A Socio-Legal Analysis of Netizens’ Legal Culture in Digital Vigilantism and Cyber Law Enforcement

Abstract

In an era of accelerating digital transformation, the phenomenon of digital vigilantism has emerged as a collective societal response to institutional failures in formal law enforcement. Manifested through practices of doxing and cyberbullying, this form of online self-help justice has become an increasingly prevalent recourse for netizens whose trust in judicial systems has been profoundly eroded. Yet scholarly work that comprehensively integrates both sociological and juridical dimensions within the specific context of Indonesia's digital legal culture remains conspicuously scarce. This study aims to analyse the driving factors behind digital vigilantism as a reaction to distrust in formal legal enforcement, whilst simultaneously examining the juridical and sociological implications of netizen legal culture for the principles of legal certainty and human rights protection in a digitally transformed society. Employing a socio-legal research methodology, the study bridges normative juridical analysis with empirical sociological inquiry, enabling a holistic examination of the relationship between legal structures and lived social realities. The findings reveal that digital vigilantism flourishes at the intersection of institutional legitimacy deficits, low digital legal literacy, and strong identity-based online social cohesion. Juridically, this phenomenon generates friction between freedom of expression and privacy rights, whilst simultaneously undermining due process of law and the presumption of innocence. This study advances a novel conceptual contribution by reconstructing digital legal legitimacy through a social engineering approach as a preventive strategy against cyber vigilantism. These findings are intended to serve as a conceptual foundation for reforming cyber law policy towards greater responsiveness and justice in Indonesia.