If you’ve just torched a police car, assaulted someone or smashed a store front and run off with an armful of shiny new things — all in front of a crowd of 100,000 — it’s probably only a matter of time before you get a message: “John Citizen (or one of your other 417 friends) tagged a photo of you on Facebook.”

Much has been made of the power of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to bring people together, boost mass movements and even topple dictatorships in far-off lands. Yet deep in the liberal democratic heartlands of North America, in the west coast city of Vancouver, a citizen-led virtual witchhunt is underway for those involved in the recent riot — with potentially profound implications for the mass surveillance and control, according to sociologists and social media experts.

Within minutes of the Vancouver Canucks losing game seven of the Stanley Cup hockey series to the Boston Bruins photos, videos and posts tracing each step of the ensuing violence began appearing online. Within hours, evidence was flooding in to sites such as Vancouver Riot Pics and Vancouver 2011 Riot Criminal List. The police made a public appeal for evidence, and by the fourth day, the Vancouver Police Department had received some 3500 emails from the public.

For some, the real world consequences have been swift and humiliatingly public. Some alleged rioters have lost their jobs, others have voluntarily turned themselves in to police. One previously well-regarded family has fled the city in fear after their teenage son was identified in a riot photo and their address was posted online.

But as the calls for retribution mount, so too is the unease over a situation that, according to some, is rapidly beginning to resemble East German communism or the Soviet under Stalin.

“What we’re seeing now, in my view, is social media operating as a platform for social tyranny to usurp political tyranny,” said Christopher Schneider, a social media expert and sociologist at the University of British Columbia. “This has profound implications for surveillance and the emergence of the surveilled society.

“This is the kind of behaviour that we see typically more in totalitarian societies, where people are disappeared, families are disappeared. Now of course nobody is being murdered or disappeared in Canada, but the fact that we’re taking a step in that direction is very disturbing. This is not something that should be happening in a democracy.”

The difference between East Germany and Vancouver today, of course, is the absence of political repression. Moreover, people involved in the riots were, apparently and bizarrely, voluntarily posting information about themselves from the event.

“This is unprecedented and profound — at least into the magnitude that we’re seeing from the fallout from this event,” Schneider told Crikey. “You know, the Stasi in East Germany, this is what they dreamed about. There’s so much information for the police to go through, and other agents of social control, the government, for instance.”

And the evidence just keeps on rolling in, with alleged rioters issuing public confessions and making impassioned pleas for forgiveness. As ordinary lives are increasingly forced into public view and scrutinised by the internet’s two billion users, it seems the boundaries between anonymity and instant recognisability, connection and division, and the real and the virtual are collapsing.

Where previously the internet was disparaged, even feared, for the anonymity of its users, the real danger — and power — of the internet may well be the opposite: that in a web 2.0 world, no one can hide. Everyone, everywhere will be unmasked eventually.

Moreover, in a world where one’s connections can, it seems, turn against you with startling ferocity, the power of the internet to answer that human connection for craving, cuts both ways. For some, like the riot’s now-iconic “kissing couple” who were identified half a world away by the man’s mother in Perth, being connected has brought worldwide recognition and, apparently, the potential to cash in on millions. For others, it has brought isolation and humiliation at the hands of a new kind of mob.

“The citizens who had quite ironically condemned the riot while it was happening, are [now] doing and saying the very same things in cyberspace that they were condemning people doing in everyday life in downtown Vancouver,” Schneider said.

But is it really the same? On the face of it, destroying property and vilifying someone in an online post are two entirely different acts. However, as some alleged rioters themselves have pointed out, both acts are nasty, both are fuelled by anger and both cause damage. Indeed, these days, it is far easier to clean up a smashed store front than it is to clear your name after its been tarnished online.

Furthermore, if part of the backlash is over the breaking of laws, the online crowd are arguably also breaking laws such as the Youth Criminal Justice Act with the naming and shaming of young offenders. So are those involved in the online backlash just a bunch of hypocrites? The answer may not be a simple yes or no, Schneider says.

“Human beings are social beings and we’re taught how to interact with people in everyday life — when to say please and thank you, how to be polite — and we learn how to be citizens,” he said. “What’s happening now is that increasingly … [we are] becoming a nation and a globe of cyber-citizens but we’re not being socialised how to act and interact with each other in cyberspace.

“It explains in part the profound disconnect between the everyday life and the virtual world and why some people are doing and saying things in cyberspace they would not otherwise say in everyday life.”

Another thing to consider is that what we’re seeing online probably isn’t the worst of it, says Alexandra Samuel, director of the Social and Interactive Media Centre at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, British Columbia.

“People are being hateful, they’re being racist, they’re being misogynist, and then there’s just the plain fact of people being harassed,” she said. “Frankly, [the comments] are relatively tame because the people moderating the site are trying to take down the most offensive comments.

“Ultimately, though, this is counterproductive because it disguises the hatefulness and the vituperativeness and mob psychosis that sets in in the online behaviour.”

Part of the problem, Samuel says, is that people don’t think crowdsourced repression can happen here. But if informant cultures — like that in East Germany, where an estimated 5% of citizens may have been spying on their neighbours for the Stasi — existed in the past, they could emerge again if the lessons of history are forgotten, she warns.

“When you get into the job of crowdsourcing public surveillance or law enforcement you’re getting into very dangerous territory,” she said. “Some of the world’s darkest moments have happened when people have taken the law into their own hands or when the line between law enforcement and civilians has broken down.”

Yet the problem may not simply be historical myopia; it may be cultural. In Western liberal democracies where citizens are continually told they are free, citizens are simply not as wary of their governments — or each other — as they perhaps should be.

“The bottom line of this is that if we can use certain tools to communicate, bring people together, identify people, make friends, etc, exactly the same things can be done by the other side,” said freelance journalist and author Antony Loewenstein, who has conducted extensive research on the internet in repressive regimes.

“Sort of a self-evident thing to say, but a lot of people simply don’t think of it like that. In repressive states they do because they know how it works… The regime in Iran, for example, has literally armies of Iranian cyber-warriors who go around identifying dissidents or trying to destroy dissident websites… China is of course the most extreme example. No one knows an exact figure but at least 150,000 people every day surf the internet looking for suspect comments, websites.

“So the amount of thoughtless information that people put on Facebook simply doesn’t happen in a repressive state… It literally is a matter of life and death.”

David Vaile, executive director of the Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre at the University of NSW, hopes the aftermath of this event will serve as a clear warning to social media users.

“In real life it’s recognised that we don’t want to live in a police state … [yet] people are putting up on Facebook evidence that they [the police] would have had to get a warrant for before,” Vaile said.

“It means that the ordinary protections of, for instance, knowing that you’re actually being interrogated or investigated, or your stuff is being searched, that’s set aside. The need for them to prove suspicion and therefore to focus on specific potential offences, that’s gone. The warning in most jurisdictions — anything you do or say may be taken down and used against you in a prosecution, you’ve got a right to silence — they don’t have to do that.

“As I’ve previously said, Facebook and other sites like it are essentially giant offshore evidence gathering machines.”

With the wheels of these machines now in motion, Vancouver is now seeing the capacity of these sites to divide communities, undermine solidarity and facilitate Big Brother-style mass surveillance and social control. But how much impact is this one event likely to have in the long run?

Peter Chow-White, a social media and communications expert with Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, is skeptical. “When you walk down the street in downtown Vancouver or in any large city for that matter, do you notice the hundreds of times your picture is taken on CCTV? We’re used to that level of surveillance now. Do we change the way we walk down the street or the way we make decisions? Do we pay attention to those cameras? Largely, the answer is probably no.”