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Crowdsourcing Failed In Boston Bombing Aftermath
Nerval's Lobster writes "With emotions high in the hours and days following the Boston Marathon bombing, hundreds of people took to Reddit's user-generated forums to pick over images from the crime scene. Could a crowd of sharp-eyed citizens uncover evidence of the perpetrators? No, but they could definitely focus attention on the wrong people. 'Though started with noble intentions, some of the activity on reddit fueled online witch hunts and dangerous speculation which spiraled into very negative consequences for innocent parties,' read an April 22 posting on Reddit's official blog. 'The reddit staff and the millions of people on reddit around the world deeply regret that this happened.'"
This has been a fascinating phenomenon, and it's only going to evolve more as time goes on.
Crowdsourcing or witch hunt? Reddit, 4chan users try to ID Boston bomb suspects
Boston bombing: How internet detectives got it very wrong
'I didn't do anything!' High school track runner forced to deny involvement in Boston Marathon bombings after a picture of him and his coach is widely circulated
Social media as breaking-news feed: Worse information, faster
Worse information, faster -- this neatly sums it up, and I'm a huge proponent of social media and its benefits, including to government.
And for the record, no, the FBI wasn't seeking to "censor" anyone, and the "next logical step" (as I have seen asserted elsewhere) won't be to "shut down" internet or social media resources during major public emergencies; however, law enforcement agencies absolutely can request, once they have identified suspects via investigative and legal processes, that people focus on those instead of playing CSI: Internet.
Sadly, the echo chamber of the internet enables some people, in seemingly increasing numbers, to go a step further and choose to believe everything is automatically a "false flag" conspiracy with the stated perpetrators "framed"â¦..
The "wisdom of crowds" can be a misnomer.
Perhaps this is why a defined legal system is more valuable than the historically-standard mob rule.
>> crowdsourcing
Why not - they wouldn't have found all those witches in 1692 without crowdsourcing.
No, they don't regret it yet.
They might regret it after the libel suits pop up.
Then maybe the rest of the internet will learn something.
Sure you can say it failed. It failed to even gather that information.
As detailed in my last post on this topic, some responsible individual on Reddit named Thirtydegrees decided to give us a little background on what went down (I know it's long but it's worth the read for chronological context).
/r/FindBostonBombers to see exactly what happened! Well, you can't. Oddly enough, the founder of that subreddit decided that he should just set it to private (here's a Reddit friendly vulgar meme of my request). Guess what? The founder of findbostonbombers doesn't want to be identified! Bizarre that he/she would create a subreddit devoted to identifying people and then themselves think that it's completely acceptable for their identities to be protected. Should you have a right to know who is accusing you of what? Well, you find out that you have done something wrong ... time to own up to it, right? Right? No! Not in the futuristic amazing world of crowdsourcing!
/r/findbostonbombers. They went straight from "we have images that our untrained eye finds suspicious" straight to "these are the guys who killed innocent people, help us identify them and harass their families."
But wait! We can do better than that! Let's go look at
Also hilarious is that they are saying the bombers have been found. Wrong. Whatever they did, they are still innocent until proven guilty! I am quite upset with everyone dropping the "alleged" word and referring to them as "the bombers" instead of "the suspects." They will get their day in court, that's how this stuff works. That's what lead to all the bad stuff that happened in
We live in an era of digital lynch mobs.
My work here is dung.
You're acting as if information was "withheld"...it wasn't. There is no mechanism to release every single piece of evidence collected by every agency to the internet and "crowdsource" it.
What was "crowdsourced" was information that was already on the internet. Furthermore, the FBI did, in fact, release the relevant snippets of video and pictures from the private security cameras and other sources.
Sorry, but "crowdsourcing" is not always the answer, and this was not a success, much less a rousing one.
Another example, of many of where Reddit users show an immaturity the likes of which 4chan will not even accept....
'Though started with noble intentions...
The paving stones of the path to hell.
Everyone seems to forget that the police and FBI could not find the final suspect, it was the crowd-sourcing by releasing people outside that did. I think crowd-sourcing is OK if we don't form up a mob with pitchforks, but instead turn all leads in to the authorities.
Witch Hunts? In Massachusetts? Surely, you jest.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
...a racist version of 'Where's Waldo?'
s/Crowdsourcing Failed/Witch Hunting Succeeds In Boston Bombing Aftermath
Good people go to bed earlier.
CINNA THE POET
Directly, I am going to Caesar's funeral.
First Citizen
As a friend or an enemy?
CINNA THE POET
As a friend.
Second Citizen
That matter is answered directly.
Fourth Citizen
For your dwelling,--briefly.
CINNA THE POET
Briefly, I dwell by the Capitol.
Third Citizen
Your name, sir, truly.
CINNA THE POET
Truly, my name is Cinna.
First Citizen
Tear him to pieces; he's a conspirator.
CINNA THE POET
I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinna the poet.
Fourth Citizen
Tear him for his bad verses, tear him for his bad verses.
CINNA THE POET
I am not Cinna the conspirator.
Fourth Citizen
It is no matter, his name's Cinna; pluck but his
name out of his heart, and turn him going.
Third Citizen
Tear him, tear him! Come, brands ho! fire-brands:
to Brutus', to Cassius'; burn all: some to Decius'
house, and some to Casca's; some to Ligarius': away, go!
Could a crowd of sharp-eyed citizens uncover evidence of the perpetrators? No, but they could definitely focus attention on the wrong people.
This isn't totally fair. While there are certainly a lot of opportunities for amateur detectives to end up focusing on the wrong people, the reality is that information available online was limited. It was not the same set of data that the government had access to. Unless the actual perpetrators were documented in the online data set, and it doesn't appear they were, the online search was bound to fail.
Had the online community been given the exact same set of information as the FBI, it would have been very interesting to determine what conclusions would have been reached. That would have been a much better test of crowd sourcing.
This is something that are country tends to fail miserably at and unfortunately you can't blame it all on corporations. The media very much deserves a large part of the blame for this with an attitude that everyone's private business is public business. It's not just this issue, Gawker took their anti-gun crusade and published peoples personal addresses after they followed New York law and registered their guns.
Example after example of the media blatantly disregarding people's privacy can be cited with entirely too much ease. As a society we should be ashamed of events like this and look to Europe for guidance on respecting other peoples privacy. Perhaps someday the right for privacy should be the next great civil rights crusade?
Basically, that's what happens when a bunch of lazy and idiot nerdies begin to think they can do something relevant from their sofas. Slacktivism is a cancer.
Yeah, who cares if one teenager got put through hell and the parents of another missing teenager experienced even more heartbreak, eventually they identified the real people (after seeing them identified by actual responsible news reporters) and had no noticeable impact on the man hunt!
The crowd sourcing, in this case, only has a tiny percentage of the video/images the authorities had. So logically, the list of legit suspects runs out quickly, and then you have LOTS of outliers being tagged as well. Then you throw in the idiots who's only justification for tagging someone is "brown" and where else do you expect this to go.
Weed out the "brown" taggers, ignore everything after the 1st 6 hours, and you have a set of suspects that were actually somewhat legit.
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
Why do the Boston police use open radios anyway? If they used encrypted sets there wouldn't be people listening in on the scanner. Well, not as much anyway.
If they're your best bet, you're FUCKED!
They probably did that on purpose.
As the saying goes "none of us are as dumb as all of us".
You forgot to insinuate that someone was a lizard-man.
No, They were not identified with lightning speed after the images were released of the suspects. They were identified after they hijacked a car, told the passenger they were responsible for the bombings, let the passenger go, one of them was killed in a shootout and they police finger printed him. Even those people that saw the surviving suspect on a daily basis failed to identify him from the picture.
I'd say that gathering of images from the crowds helped the police find the images of the bombers. But the crowds themselves, were actually pretty useless after that, unless you call the hijacked man or the boat owners 911 calls "crowd sourcing".
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Yeah, succeeded in brilliantly mis-identifying one of the suspects as missing Brown student Sunil Tripathi, and the other as somebody named Mike Mulugeta, after "somebody heard that name on a scanner."
And before that, it was "blue robe guy." And before that, it was "blue tracksuit guy" and his suspicious friend. And before that (and still), "those two guys from Craft International, conducting an obvious false flag." And before that, anybody else who happened to be pictured anywhere along the marathon route matching any of these criteria:
-- "vaguely brown"
-- looking at or holding a cell phone
-- wearing or carrying a bag or a backpack
-- happened to be looking in a different direction than most of the crowd in the split-second that the photo was taken;
-- happened to simply look like someone who some guy on reddit once had an argument with.
No, the "crowd" engaged in ridiculous histrionics, and it rapidly devolved into a travesty: a game of "Telephone" conducted in an echo chamber.
Find your Boston Bomber name!
Find your Boston Bomber name by taking the first name of an innocent man and the second name of an innocent man and posting it on reddit.
Whee!
I listened to a discussion of the relative success or failure of "the internet" in helping with the Boston attack on the NPR show Tell Me More yesterday. The discussion was mostly aimed at Twitter because the host and guests know about it, but I think they were actually discussion the Reddit activity without realizing it. One of the guests, who was a professor of...internet stuff at Harvard made a claim that had me rolling my eyes with abandon.
He claimed that 80 or 90 percent of posts on Twitter were useful collaborations that have value and that the empty and troll posts all fit into the remaining 10 or 20 percent. That's absurd. As one of the internet people who really sees this stuff from the trenches, I'd estimate that fewer than 10% of total Twitter traffic can reasonably be called valuable.
Journalists love Twitter, though, which is one of the reasons Twitter is successful. Old media loves to refer to Twitter. The BBC World News has a segment in every show where they read (almost always trite and stupid) tweets about the stories they just reported. In doing so they increase Twitter's popularity and then associate themselves with Twitter in order to be hip. Underlying it all is the uglier truth that was openly discussed on Tell Me More: the journalist guests insisted that the ability to get news 15 minutes after events occur is far more important than the fact that this news is usually incorrect. They're outsourcing the irresponsibility of irresponsible journalism, letting them claim to break news first and then when they're wrong they can simply blame their anonymous sources. Journalistic integrity means so little in news sources now, but because of the terrible way the market works, a 15 minute delay is vastly better than a 120 minute delay.
Society would best be served with slower, more curated news, but markets don't optimize results for societal benefit.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
True! I mean, which one of us hasn't been involved in a deadly shootout with police while carrying pipe bombs?
You're acting as if information was "withheld"...it wasn't. There is no mechanism to release every single piece of evidence collected by every agency to the internet and "crowdsource" it.
He didn't say it was "withheld", he said it was unavailable, which is true.
If the FBI wanted to test crowdsourcing, they could easily come up with a mechanism to make all of the video and still photos available to the public - they could set up a web page (leveraging commercial offerings like Youtube and Flickr if they didn't want to build their own) with every single piece of footage they have. There are lots of reasons why they wouldn't do that, of course, but to claim that crowdsourcing failed when the crowd didn't have access to the all of the data that the investigators had is not fair.
Most people aren't like you, they take it with a grain of salt.
Google Fight agrees, and "pinch" was probably assisted by recipes.
The first picture I saw of one of the alleged bombers was through one of 4chan, Reddit or 9gag (I'm not positive which because I was tabbing between them between customers). He had a bag that appeared to match the remains of one that had apparently held a pressure cooker bomb. I've been wondering ever since why the person who made the connection hasn't been mentioned in the mainstream media. Instead I see what, from my perspective, is an article claiming the media got it right (Our media? Sure. Right) and the nameless got it wrong. Says who? Oh yeah, the bought and paid for corporate schill media. Put down the koolaid.
I wanted to say "Look redditors are stupid, 4chan/2ch are much better at things like this", but I only have anecdotal evidence from the few cases I've heard (hunting down kitten killers and stuff like that). Does anyone have any data on the "success" rate of witch hunts on 4chan and 2ch?
The combined Reddit/4Chan photo collection was pretty crappy and lacking in metadata. The website from which the pictures of the two high school kids that got "fingered" by Reddit was very upfront about stating that the picture of the two of them from Page 1 of the NYP was taken 3 hours before the bombing. Photos from the same source closer to the time of the blast don't show them or the bomb in place yet. This could have been used to discard them as subjects if that info was more widely known.
The police/FBI had a huge advantage in that they had all relevant surveillance camera imagery plus everything 4chan had, plus more, including the eye witness reports of the surviving victims. They were probably able to correlate that imagery to cell tower call records and narrow down what phoes were in use right there and then, including the bombers.
When a bomb explodes, you run away, you don't stop to take pictures.
The only failure is people that were not there assuming that crowdsourcing should be able to solve this.
BTW, this is why we have trained professionals to solve crimes, and not leave it to the idiot masses. Crowdsourcing is not an intelligent solution to anything.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
also, when the pictures were finally released, crowdsourcing SUCCEEDED brilliantly!
Yeah, once it was obvious what to look for, the 'many eyes' solution worked well.
The problem came when the solution wasn't obvious, people jumped to conclusions without considering that their idea might not be right, or even testing their idea further.
Like I am doing right now, I just guessed randomly. I created a hypothesis, now I need to figure out a way to test it. If people realized that half their ideas are merely hypotheses, the world would be a better place.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Reddit was a positive feedback loop. Good information may have been amplified-- but bad information was, too.
Quoting from http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/04/19/17826915-missing-brown-university-students-family-dragged-into-virally-fueled-false-accusation-in-boston "Reddit became overnight 'one of the more ugly and disgusting places that had a lot of traffic ... There were very intense and ugly comments throughout the last 12 hours.'"
Actually, the live threads on reddit were pretty damn fast and accurate.
Fast... but not always accurate.
From the Atlantic's analysis http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/04/it-wasnt-sunil-tripathi-the-anatomy-of-a-misinformation-disaster/275155/
" The next step in this information flow is the trickiest one. Here's what I know. At 2:42am, Greg Hughes, who had been following the Tripathi speculation, tweeted, "This is the Internet's test of 'be right, not first' with the reporting of this story. So far, people are doing a great job. #Watertown" Then, at 2:43am, he tweeted, "BPD has identified the names: Suspect 1: Mike Mulugeta. Suspect 2: Sunil Tripathi."
The only problem is that there is no mention of Sunil Tripathi in the audio preceding Hughes' tweet. I've listened to it a dozen times and there's nothing there even remotely resembling Tripathi's name. I've embedded the audio from 2:35 to 2:45 am for your own inspection. Multiple groups of people have been crowdsourcing logs of the police scanner chatter and none of them have found a reference to Tripathi, either. It's just not there."
"Be right, not first" certainly failed big time.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The road to Hell is paved with 'em.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
To be fair, the video that investigators used to identify the two bombers was never released to the public (AFAIK, it *still* hasn't been released). So its tough to say that crowdsourcing the investigation "failed", when it wasn't really a fair test.
A far better test would be to look at what happened on Friday when the suspects were being hunted for. All day they insisted everybody in town hide indoors to not "hamper" the search. Then at the end of a day of failure they gave a very dejected press conference where they told everyone they'd failed to find the guy, and they could leave their houses.
Within 30 minutes, someone had spotted the guy and he was surrounded.
That's the power of crowd-sourcing. No matter how many cops they flooded the city with, it is no match for half a million ordinary citizens who know what looks out of place in their area and what doesn't.
I would say that in the future it would be a good idea to make it clear from the get-go that only the investigation is being crowdsourced. There are many very good reasons why we prefer to have a single authority performing the actual law enforcement duties of arrest, prosecution, etc. This whole episide does show the limits of crowdsourcing, but also its power if folks would just have the courage to get out of its way.
The key revelation as to identifying one of the bombers was testimony given by one of the bombing victims who saw the guy drop the bomb at his feet.
http://www.capitalbay.com/uk/332410-boston-bombing-suspect-identified-by-double-amputee-victim-who-woke-up-and-described-man-to-fbi.html
Video was important as a way of verifying things, but for the real answer you had to be there. Literally.
Well, 'crowdsourced justice' is essentially an euphemism for lynch.
And punish them! Who's with me???!!
"Mob mentality continues to be irrational and unreliable when using digital means."
Might make an interesting psychology or sociology paper material here for someone working on a thesis, but it honestly doesn't seem that surprising.
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
The failure was in leadership not effort. People wanted to help. The FBI can and should take that into account for major incidents. Provide some outlet for people to actively help in a useful and meaningful way.
In light of the failures of facial recognition software identifying people wouldn't it have at least been useful to have an FBI website where people could tag people against facial images the FBI has determined to be unique?
You obviously don't understand what I am referring to, so why did you feel the need to fart an opinion?
Here's the last one, I'll let you work backwards from there:
http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1cpmh6/live_boston_update_thread_part_9/
Of course, they arguably only hijacked that car after they realized they would be identified from the publicly-released photos. But that doesn't deter from your point that the crowd wasn't helping.
that wouldnt have happened if all the info had been shared you moron
Things may have gotten botched up on Reddit.. but somebody ID'd the photos and called the Feds...
also, when the pictures were finally released, crowdsourcing SUCCEEDED brilliantly!
Ah, yes, so after all the work was done for them by the FBI, crowdsourcing swooped in to take credit and STILL screw it up badly by identifying the wrong people.
the suspects were identified with lightning speed, and caught soon after.
...by the cops acting on a tip from a homeowner who thought something was suspicious in their backyard, NOT by the glorious collective of immaculate hackers who selflessly combined their mighty CROWD POWERS!!! [pause for echo effect] for justice and righteousness.
In fact, after crowdsourcing fingered the wrong people and released their names to a mob thirsty for blood and revenge, it's more accurate to say the police identified the REAL suspects with lightning speed and quickly caught them despite crowdsourcing getting in the way.
Crowdsourcing did not fail because what occurred was not crowdsourcing.
There is a distinction between, on the one hand, the emergent behavior which spontaneously arises from ungoverned social interaction and, on the other hand, the management practice of dividing and framing a problem such that it can be solved by large, loosely-affiliated groups of anonymous individuals working in parallel. The latter is crowdsourcing. The former, in the case of attempts to identify Boston Marathon suspects in online fora such as reddit, is a vigilante mob.
At least that interpretation is consistent with the conventional usage of the term "crowdsourcing" up to this point. Consider well-known examples such as the Mechanical Turk, the search for the wreckage of Steve Fosset's plane and prediction markets such as Iowa Electonic Markets. In all case the role of any individual in the crowd is predefined and constrained in advance by design. Constraints can include the dimension of response and the information to be evaluated.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
"the FBI did, in fact, release the relevant snippets of video and pictures from the private security cameras and other sources."
I haven't been able to find the video footage which actually shows one of the suspects dropping off the package and walking away. The FBI claims they have this and that it was the compelling piece of evidence which put the focus on these two guys.
that wouldnt have happened if all the info had been shared you moron
No, instead they would've gotten off in court.
There are processes that have to be followed in evidence handling.
Shockingly, the experts seem to know more about that than you or Reddit.
unless someone has already mentioned it, in the Reddit photos, one of the individuals is shown without a backpack
who clearly had it earlier. Now, it turns out he was innocent and not involved.
And, I can pretty much say the FBI would have been doing exactly the same thing had they not had the actual footage
of the pack being placed. Let's face it, and I'm glad about this, the FBI got very lucky. If they didn't have that footage,
I say again, they (99%) would have arrived at near the same conclusion as the people on Reddit.
Once they saw him place the backpack, it was easier to look for that person in all of the photos/footage they had and see him
associated with his {then unknown} brother.
What's troubling is that the older brother didn't match on their facial rec. software - hope they saved the receipt for a refund -
considering the older brother is well documented in their system.
Crowd sourcing has been happening long before the age of the internet and is a well documented social phenomenon that
happens when a tragic event like this occurs.
I don't see a failure, but there are many opportunities to improve.
Yes, but did they hit their Kickstarter goal?
Look, crowdsourcing in a tragedy is a phenomenon, not an expectation. If it were an expectation, law enforcement agencies would release all the information they have on crimes (sans names, etc.) and allow "the crowd" to solve the problem.
But they don't. They don't want your help. They only want to be *seen* as being open to public input because the vast majority of public input is utter crap. They also don't want to be seen as incapable of doing their own jobs.
So crowdsourcing was never part of the equation. It was never given the job @ Boston. It was never facilitated. There are no expectations of success when no one asks for your help and thus there is no failure.
Furthermore, it is possible that the crowdsourcing delayed the identification of the suspects. In this interview:
http://www.npr.org/2013/04/19/178005649/former-classmate-of-suspect-he-was-friendly-quiet
one of Dzokhar's classmates explains that she thought it was quite the coincidence that the guy in the picture looked so much like him. She only thought it was a coincidence, though, because she believed that he was already identified as the missing student that used to attend Brown.
The witch hunters attack and harm innocent people. Those harming innocent people need to be brought to justice, witch hunters included.
The problem isn't that crowdsourcing fingered too many of the wrong people, the problem is that all the photographic evidence was transparent and all the investigation was opaque.
People can therefore only spot potential suspects, and it takes investigation and cross referencing to rule them out or not. All that investigation stuff is secret, so it's no wonder people start shouting about mob justice when it appears the investigators aren't even investigating when, the truth is, they've already investigated that angle.
The crowdsourcing shows that no detail will be left unexposed, but in order for that to be helpful, the other side of the research has to be exposed also.
More Twoson than Cupertino
What I'm confused by is the seeming absence of the two suspects in any of the photos that were pawed over by reddit users. Has anyone seen the two brothers in the photos that were so widely reviewed? It seems to me that the photos from the two men who were overlooking bomb location 1 would have had a rough time NOT seeing the older brother placing his bomb.
Not trying to imply anything untoward, but it seems to me that although the Reddit crew had a fair number of very good photos, they were seemingly not seeing a single photo by which they could have identified the right people.
tone
Edwards: Why the big secret? People are smart. They can handle it.
Kay: A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow.
Crowdsourcing has its place, but some things are better left to professionals.
Slashdot has turned into a MIC voice.
Seriously, saying sorry means fuck all. Actually get off your ass and do something to change your ways instead of going "oh boy that sure was bad" and then continuing on as before. THE WORLD IS BUILT FOR STUPID PEOPLE
INGSOC loves you guys. No criticism intended. Your leader is soon to appear.
The FBI looking at the torrents of footage would be looking for behavioral signs in the crowd, (i.e. not watching the race, multiple people moving in tandem, not looking panicked after the blasts, proximity during the attack etc.) and video to review is much more valuable than stills, which the armchair analysts were looking at. I watched the reddit threads fairly closely, and saw people flag a person tending to a child in a stroller as suspicious behavior. In the still photo where the stroller was obscured, it would appear that way. The context that you can gain from video is far more useful, and the lack of this context is what leads to the jumps to conclusions we saw. The internet won't ever compete in a case like this without the video, which likely will never be shared.
I have no idea what they were thinking or planning on doing. Its possible that the photos changed their plans.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Wait, you mean the NRA's "give everyone a gun" idea is not a good idea? Who woulda thunk that?
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
There should really be a corollary to godwin for 1984.
I think I need to write a sequel to 1984 called 4891 which an organization uses terrible analogies based on popular fiction to take power.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
It should be noted that while majority vote results in bad decisions (such as electing Bush and Obama), groups that reach unanimous agreement come up with great answers, albeit slowly.
Groups that require at least unanimous consent often have to come up with better solutions than anyone started with, to resolve objections. I've seen it many times where two sides couldn't agree on whether to do A or B, so they had to come up with C, something better.
Anyone see this? NSFW, btw. It's somewhat difficult to stomach, but damn the guy makes some interesting points.
http://buelahman.wordpress.com/2013/04/20/are-you-just-a-believer-or-do-you-think/
Forums are the original crowd source failure.
Reddit is full of know-nothing, teen-age girl watch shitbags.
First of all, you misspelled "Murdoch".
Secondly, the Supreme Court didn't "rule" anything of the sort.
1. It wasn't the Supreme Court.
2. That wasn't the ruling.
3. "FOX News" wasn't involved.
It was a 2003 ruling by a Florida appeals court dealing with a local network affiliate in Florida, WTVT, which happened to be a FOX affiliate. It had NOTHING to do with the Supreme Court, NOTHING to do with saying 'Fox News only had to have some "news" in their programming', and NOTHING to do with FOX News (the cable network channel). (Here's the background, if you care.)
Further still, NO opinion/op-ed/editorial shows on ANY of the 24/7 cable news networks can really be characterized as "news". There are precious few hours of strictly "news" programming on the cable news channels. Depending on your personal politics, you'll claim that some particular channels are worse than others -- and be no more or less correct than people at the other end of the spectrum making the opposite claims. (See also...)
Also funny is that you think that only "American news agencies" are beholden to profits and other interests, or that anything fundamental has really changed in the last 5, 10, 25, 50 or more years. What has changed is there is more editorial content and all the ridiculousness that the 24 hour news cycle has brought us...but more information, in more detail, is out there in a variety of sources -- INCLUDING the traditional print and television US "mainstream media" -- for those willing to look.
A truly dizzying array of completely incorrect information from someone who thinks they are informed...
Crowd sourcing is only good at some very important tasks, but was truly terrible and libelous in an information vacuum. Reddit deserves some credit for Thursday night successes of the forum, but ultimately old fashioned police work was key in this specific case.
The "witch hunt" summary is accurate for the Monday to Thursday 5PM time, when so much was said that was unprovable, and much more difficult to disprove, like the NY Post photos of innocent people accused of being the terrorists, taking too many days to be seen as extremely wrong.
FBI OFFICIAL PHOTOS
After the FBI released Official Suspect photos at about 5PM Thursday, April 18, 2013, Reddit (or rather Subreddit "findbostonbombers") had some commenters who were actually very useful, and had contributions which were well substantial and well ahead of the media.
DAVID GREEN PHOTO
The David Green photo from the corner of Fairfield Street and Boylston Street just after the bombing was there, less than 2 hours after the FBI official suspect photo release, and more than 3 hours before it was on NY Times 11:14 PM published website article, and apparently also the CNN Piers Morgan interview of David Green the same late night. The Monday photo showed Suspect #2, with the white hat, with the smoke from both bombs visible, walking around the corner of Fairfield Street directly toward MIT campus, foreshadowing events late Thursday night, including the murder of the MIT police officer.
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/18/new-higher-resolution-image-of-boston-marathon-suspect-emerges/
SUSPECT HAT IDENTIFICATION
The crowd sourcing found the official web catalog photos of both hats make/model/catalog-photos used by the terrorists. This is a quickly verifiable task, that the subreddit did very well. I suspect that all such commodity product identifications can be done fastest with most accuracy, by a large crowd that cares, such as was the case on Reddit that night. Reddit found links to the official web catalog photos of these hats, under ideal circumstances.
This is not the first time either, a prior case was solved by a sharped eyed reddit user identified a Cadillac 1990 head light from a crime scene photo, helping resolve that case.
The hat ID was potentially extremely useful for several reasons; More witnesses could be asked about the clear photos of the hats, helping the FBI. Also, somewhat technical, but the FBI could use computational clarifying techniques, using these identified and purchasable hats, to calculate a clearer image from fuzzy source photos of the faces of the Subjects in the photos. Admittedly these computer image refinement techniques are more familiar to astronomers than crime fighting, more like the CSI type TV shows than real life law enforcement, but it would be possible.
OTHER PHOTOS ON REDDIT AFTER 5PM THURSDAY
At least two other photos of the official FBI Suspects, not then available, were found and shared on Reddit. I have not seen either of these photos in the press.
Photo link: before the bombing possibly Suspect #1 black hat from behind, headed east on Boylston from about the Starbucks, (next to her ring). Less likely but possibly Suspect #2 far left (under her elbow).
http://imgur.com/a/34wtj
Photos link: Potentially a very damning photo, possibly Suspect #2, with the backwards white cap on, a back pack on ground, and possible 8 year old victim still alive. (the younger Tsarnaev brother is accused of being Suspect #2), a back pack on the ground, behind possibly the 8 year old bombing victim who was killed by a bomb blast.
http://imgur.com/a/fEZhX
DETAIL FROM IMAGES
Although guessing who the terrorists were was something that Reddit utterly failed at, libeling many people Monday to Thursday 5PM, once the FBI re
Even those people that saw the surviving suspect on a daily basis failed to identify him from the picture.
The lack of objectivity is a huge problem. Nobody wants to believe it's their friend or acquaintance who did something so horrible. And the ones who can believe it wouldn't want to finger that friend or acquaintance either, in fear that they're wrong and just caused their friend a shitload of unnecessary inconvenience.
What's particularly interesting is that it might have worked if their action was not nearly as heinous. If they had been accused of rape or just simply triple murder, there wouldn't be nearly as much of an initial disbelief. This effect only exists because of the magnitude of the initial crime.
What's also interesting is that if these guys had not made the ruckus they had when trying to get away, it would've taken at least another week to ID them. By then, they could've been anywhere in the world, or done plenty more harm before being caught. Don't forget that they were looking for another target before revealing themselves.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
If you don't post quickly on slashdot thread, one's comment is ignored, no mater what new links and central examples for the thread you post. Slashdot always skews to brief humor, and away from modding up the "informative", especially if it is only 1 hour tardy from most comments.
I recall the first time I noticed this, slashdot talked about a meta article about "red light traffic cameras" in Washington DC, and a friend of mine and I, both from DC, both posted links to where cameras were. I posted a link to the official Metro Police Department page listing where the Red Light Cameras in DC actually were at that time, and he posted to the freedom of speech chilling and potentially terrorist capturing secret cameras around the National Mall, where many of the most important gatherings of people in the US happen, for people to publicly seek redress of grievances from the US Congress. The links we posted were the basis of many future Slashdot seed/top discussions, yet viewed as utterly irrelevant my forum modders that day. Neither of these squarely on topic post with links was modded up above 2. The same thing happened when I was the first person on shashdot to mention the knoppix distro. I feel that happen today with this crowd source topic, as the forum brushed by, not identifying key material and links.
Crowd sourcing on slashdot requiring many people to agree can be very useful for finding brief humor but dreadful at evaluating informative links.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/02/05/05/1231231/traffic-cameras-in-dc
Really interesting, thanks!
Given your interest, I think that you (and the other readers here) would be really interested in some recent research that I have come across that theorizes about crowds and such similar phenomena.
It’s called “The Theory of Crowd Capital” and you can download it here if you’re interested: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2193115
In my view it provides a powerful, yet simple model, getting to the heart of the matter. Enjoy!
make better decisions than 5 smart people.
Crowdsourcing DID work - but it was the police and security services who identified the younger bomber in a one photo - walking nonchalantly away from the scene while everyone else was running, terrified.
Crowdsourcing isn't the issue - it is whether those making the judgment calls have any experience in making the call. A properly trained police and security service does; a bunch of hotheads on reddit, thinking that they are "doing the right thing" do not.
Facebook. Reddit. enough said.
"It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information" --Oscar Wilde
Casteism
the suspects look like everyone to whom i owe money, oddly enough.