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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.
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.
Witch Hunts? In Massachusetts? Surely, you jest.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
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?
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!
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.
Damn straight. There have been zero witch attacks since Reddit got on the case.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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)
Except this case shows why crowd sourcing this type of thing shouldn't be done, and you say it yourself: they did not have access to all of the data and information. Government officials will have statements from eye witnesses, footage from CCTV, physical evidence at the scene, etc. All the online "detectives" have access to is what was released by the media: some photos and ramblings of reporters who themselves had access to incomplete data. And this only compounded the problem when a mainstream "news" source like the New York Post went to Reddit instead of the government for ID of the suspects in an effort to be the first to broadcast pictures. It basically comes down to this: if you aren't there on the ground, if you don't have hands-on access to the raw, unfiltered data, you do not know everything and you need to shut the hell up, because all you are doing is spreading more disinformation at a time when the signal to noise ratio is already heavily skewed towards the noise.
Basically, incomplete data leads to inaccurate analysis
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
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?
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
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.
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