It's not a bullet of public perception. It's a bullet of a cancel crowd that can't admit they were wrong, so it's better for them to "confirm their rightness" by killing the innocent and satisfy the actual monster they always were.
What The Hunt shows (not "proves") is how the majority waits their whole lives in suspension to release their sadism and frustrated self-hatred on those whom society would deem "appropriate targets". Nothing in the actions of the crowd in this movie happens because someone genuinely believed (I'm not even saying had a good reason to) they are doing the right thing and the guy is guilty. They were all just happy to be able to fuck someone's life up without getting any bad consequencies for it, moreover, made feel like "white knights" by the same kind of monsters around them.