What Do We Do When the Internet Mob Is Wrong?

New submitter cornicefire writes "By now most people have heard the news and seen the picture of the boy who was killed over the new Nike sneakers. There are Facebook pages devoted to fist-shaking protests about materialism and greed. Yada yada yada. But while the scuffles over the shoes were real, the death was not. The photo was just a stock photo of some kid in a lab. We know this because of some old school reporters — Steve Earley and Justin Fentin of the Baltimore Sun. In the rush to celebrate crowdsourcing, many of us pooh-pooh the old media as 'gatekeepers,' but there are times when keeping that gate locked is a good idea. After all, if one of the crowd discovered the error, the signal would barely rise above the noise. There are people claiming that anyone questioning the facts is being disrespectful. Is there something we can do about the mobocracy? How can we support the best traditions of journalism while fixing the worst? How can we nurture accuracy?"

Comments

"Dewey Defeats Truman", Chicago Tribune, 1948

[perpenso]

The rush to get a story out first is hardly anything new, nor is the inevitable occasional false reporting. "Dewey Defeats Truman", Chicago Tribune, 1948. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Defeats_Truman.

Re:"Dewey Defeats Truman", Chicago Tribune, 1948

[Anonymous Coward]

For the Chicago Tribune, they wanted to beat publishing deadline. So they made two articles in advance and were just waiting to hit the button. Wrong button was hit. As I recall, CNN also has pre-made obituaries of celebrities and head of states so all they have to do is tweak the date of death and hit publish in 10 minutes.

What's different in this Nike-murder story is that it borrows from facts and the rest is fabricated. It's like saying "Truman defeats Dewey but is Abducted by Aliens."

Also, newspapers publish corrections and/or apologizes the next day. Blogs can simply close shop and start anew an hour later - there's no accountability.

Mob rule, groupthink

[macraig]

Welcome to sociopolitical science 101. This behavior is called tyranny of the majority, and it so worried Thomas Jefferson and others who founded the United States that they crafted a new variant of democracy intended to discourage it. At least in politics....

crowd behavior and crowd thinking

[meburke]

The original post asked, "What can we do when the internet mob is wrong?" Forget it; most people don't care. Thi8s discussion about the kid who got killed over new Nike shoes came up at work last night. some of the talkers were so outraged that they ranted for over half an hour. When I tell them today that it was a hoax, they will just go, "oops" and continue on as if they didn't waste their time and emotional energy for nothing. Five years from now they will be saying, "Do your remember that time the kid got killed...?" and will have forgotten that it wasn't true.

In the long term it will mean nothing. What matters is when there are consequences in the short term. Crowds have beaten and killed people when they mistakenly thought a person ran over a little kid, or was a molester, or robbed someplace etc., etc,.. Some sociologists are claiming that Obama go elected on the basis of crowd think and internet mob-ism. (This is not scientific, but I've asked lots of people over the years why they voted for Obama, and NOT ONE of them could tell me anything about his voting record in Illinois or Washington.) Cultural biases are affecting our lives. Friends tell me it was very uncomfortable being a middle eastern person in the USA after 9/11. This type of bias may fade, but when? And how much harm does it do in the meantime?

Bryan Caplan, and Economist, wrote a book called, "The Myth of the Rational Voter" http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Rational-Voter-Democracies-Policies/dp/0691129428 , in which he points out that cultural biases against free markets and foreigners, and toward make-work and pessimism are exploited by politicians everywhere.

I doubt that there is anything we can do to offset the influence of sensationalism and propaganda except expose the facts as well as we can. (Ooops! Pessimism, right?)

Re:Nurturing accuracy

[vAltyR]

Maintaining your beliefs whether or not they are correct is not integrity; it's simply stubbornness. Integrity includes being able to admit you were wrong before, which is seems to be looked down on in our society; consider how many politicians have been accused of "flip-flopping" on a controversial subject.