Slashdot Mirror
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!
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.
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