Reddit: When ‘crowdsourcing’ goes bad

The “wisdom of crowds” apparently “doesn’t apply to terrorist manhunts,” said Nick Bilton in The New York Times. When thousands of amateur sleuths flocked to the online community Reddit last week to scour footage of the Boston bombings for clues to who planted the explosives, they did “more damage than good,” falsely implicating several innocent people, including a 17-year-old track star and a missing Brown University student. It didn’t take long for the self-appointed Sherlock Holmeses, with their circled faces and flimsy theories, to become an online “lynch mob,” said Rebecca Greenfield in TheAtlantic.com. Even as forum leaders urged caution, many pointed the finger at brown-skinned people they deemed suspicious. As social media amplified raw speculation into accusations, a number of innocent people saw their “good names maimed in public.”

This is what happens when untrained civilians try to play detective, said Alexis Madrigal, also in TheAtlantic.com.Investigating bombings simply isn’t a job for the crowd, because in a civil society, “due process” is critical to police work. “Imagine if people were standing around in Boston pointing fingers at people” and accusing them of terrorism. This was no different. It’s “plain, old vigilantism.” Before Reddit and Twitter, said Meghan Daum in the Los Angeles Times,most people could react to a national tragedy only by “making donations to the American Red Cross and forwarding emails about candlelight vigils.” Now, thanks to social media, anyone can be “a player, not a spectator,” in history-making events. The end result sometimes is a “mountain of misinformation.”

Don’t blame the Internet for all the false leads, said Mathew Ingram in PaidContent.org. Mainstream media outlets like CNN and the New York Post made equally grievous errors in the rush for scoops. Should Redditors have been more careful? Absolutely, but so should have many of the professional journalists who worked this story. Reddit has apologized for what it called “a witch hunt,” said Andrew Leonard in Salon.com, but don’t expect this to be the last time it happens. Social media have opened a Pandora’s box of frenzied sharing about nearly everything, and whenever photos and video are available of any major news event or act of terrorism, “the hive mind” will pounce with its instant analysis, overwrought argument, and shameless vigilantism. “It’s not pretty, but it’s also not going away.”

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