Boston bombings: Ignorant social media libtards spiral out of control

[Leroy N. Soetoro]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-fi-boston-bombings-
media-20130420,0,1609679,print.story

Web sleuths cast suspicion on innocent people and spread bad tips and
paranoia.

By Ken Bensinger and Andrea Chang, Los Angeles Times

5:15 AM PDT, April 20, 2013

Over the last few days, thousands of people have taken to the Internet to
play Sherlock Holmes.

Armed with little more than grainy surveillance camera videos, cellphone
photos and live tweets from police scanners, they have flooded the Web
with clues, tips and speculation about what happened in Boston and who
might have been behind it.

Monday's bombings, the first major terrorist attack on American soil in
the age of smartphones, Twitter and Facebook, provided an opportunity for
everyone to get involved. Within seconds of the first explosion, the
Internet was alive with the collective ideas and reactions of the masses.

But this watershed moment for social media quickly spiraled out of
control. Legions of Web sleuths cast suspicion on at least four innocent
people, spread innumerable bad tips and heightened the sense of panic and
paranoia.

"This is one of the most alarming social media events of our time," said
Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor at the University of
Virginia. "We're really good at uploading images and unleashing amateurs,
but we're not good with the social norms that would protect the innocent."

Even as first responders were struggling to tend to the needs of the three
killed and more than 170 injured in the Boston Marathon blasts, Web forums
were cranking out rumors that there had been four bombs instead of two,
that an area library had been targeted and that the death count was well
over a dozen.

In short order, forums like Reddit and 4chan were alive with speculation —
based on little or no evidence — that the culprits were Muslim
fundamentalists or perhaps right-wing extremists.

In a mad rush to be the first to identify the perpetrators, anonymous
posters online began openly naming people they believed had planted the
bombs. Caught up in the mania, some traditional media ran with that
information. Thursday's New York Post cover showed a photo of two men at
the marathon under the headline "Bag Men" and implied that the two were
prime suspects. In fact, neither was a suspect and one of the men, Salah
Barhoun, was a high school student from outside Boston and had nothing to
do with the explosions.

Once the FBI released images of the actual suspects, things really got out
of hand. Online gumshoes scoured the Web for faces that might match and
illustrated their work with drawings, circles and other home-brewed CSI
techniques.

Some amateur sleuths focused their suspicions on Sunil Tripathi, a Brown
University student who has been missing since last month. Using an
animation tool, they used an image of Tripathi to highlight similarities
between his face and the FBI photos of one of the Boston bombing suspects.

However, Tripathi has no apparent connection to the marathon bombing. That
was underscored Friday, when authorities revealed the identities of their
suspects, two ethnic-Chechen immigrant brothers — Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26,
and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev of Cambridge, Mass.

"We have known unequivocally all along that neither individual suspected
as responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings was Sunil," Tripathi's
family said in a statement on Friday.

Advocates of social media and crowd-sourcing have long touted its
unrivaled power to gather huge amounts of information quickly in crisis
situations. With tens of thousands of people on hand at the marathon, most
armed with smartphones, the sheer volume of data available for analysis
proved too tempting to ignore.

"People in the moment want to participate. They want to be a part of
what's going on," said Nicco Mele, an expert on technology and social
media at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

So as the Boston Police Department engaged in a gunfight with the two
brothers in Watertown, Mass., early Friday, tens of thousands of Web
denizens tuned in to live streams of police scanners, furiously tapping
notes and ideas into Reddit and Twitter.

"I feel like we've reached a certain threshold here — the Internet is
finally outstripping cable news completely," a poster using the handle
PantsGrenades wrote on Reddit. "In fact, I wonder if we're inadvertently
doing their work for them."

Their speculation was not limited to the events in Boston. The unusual
confluence of tragic and suspicious events in the past week led many
online to suggest that the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas,
might have been a terrorist attack as well and that the ricin-laced
letters mailed to politicians could have come from those behind the
marathon bombing.

According to Murray Jennex, a crisis management expert at San Diego State
University, the huge influx of online voices enabled by social media can
be extremely helpful because eye witnesses are holding cameras in almost
every location.

But beyond the photos they upload, their speculation and theorizing don't
necessarily lead to a more efficient resolution.

"There is just a lot of meaningless noise out there," he said, noting that
law enforcement and disaster management institutions can be overwhelmed by
useless tips in a crisis. "People see trends and patterns that aren't
really trends and patterns."

Another problem with social media, he said, is that there is no way to
tell who is a reliable source of information and who isn't. "People love
to speculate and some people love to make the Web equivalent of crank
calls."

On Friday morning, the Boston Police temporarily pulled the online feed of
their scanners and tweeted several warnings to the public to not endanger
their investigation and officer safety with reckless online commentary.

And a growing backlash against the finger pointing and public shaming that
spewed forth from online forums caused some posters to be chastened.
"Reminder," one Reddit user posted. "Do not post personal

information in the comments. This is raw incoming news, you could ruin an
innocent person's life by spreading an incorrect name around."

But in many ways it was too late. The Internet is forever, as the saying
goes, and the names of the innocent had already been circulated.

Experts say that the role of social media in crisis situations is only
bound to grow as smartphones proliferate further and the public continues
to clamor for instantaneous information.

"The instinct is to satisfy our voyeuristic urges," said the University of
Virginia's Vaidhyanathan.

"Sitting at our computers, it's easy to forget that there are real people
represented by these images and names," he said. "And that's when we see
the arrogance of the crowd take over."



--
Barack Obama, reelected by the dumbest voters in the history of the United
States of America.

Eric Holder, racist black murdering United States Attorney General, still
has his job.

Nancy Pelosi, Democrat criminal, accessory before and after the fact to
improper vetting of Barry Soetoro aka Barack Hussein Obama, a confirmed
felon using SSAN 042-68-4425, belonging to a dead man.

Obama ignored the brutal killing of an American diplomat in Benghazi, then
relieved American military officers who attempted to prevent said murder
in order to cover up his own ineptness.

Obama continues his goal of disarming America while ObamaCare increases
insurance premiums 200% and leaves millions without health care.

Obama helped bankrupt Illinois. Democrat run Chicago closes 54 public
schools.

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