Stop Following the Boston Bombing Suspect on Twitter

Before he allegedly decided to murder innocent spectators at the Boston Marathon with homemade explosives, Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev was on Twitter. Both The Guardian and CNN have confirmed that the handle @j_tsar, with the listed name Jahar, belongs to the 19 year-old terrorism suspect, who is still at large in locked-down Boston.

On the day of the bombing, Jahar tweeted out the following:

Ain't no love in the heart of the city, stay safe people

— Jahar (@J_tsar) April 16, 2013

His final tweet, which came two days after the carnage, reads like this:

I'm a stress free kind of guy

— Jahar (@J_tsar) April 17, 2013

Gawker's Adrian Chen has a fuller rundown of the tweets that populate his feed; as he notes, they seem pretty typical for a teenage kid. And now, everyone is following him. I've been tracking his feed out of idle curiosity today, and now, he's racking up hundreds of followers every few minutes. He's gone from have a couple hundred followers to 50,000 in a couple hours.

But, why? Does anyone actually think Tsarnaev's going to tweet again? The vast majority of his new followers aren't reporters, either. People are following him out of pure curiosity.

Are we maybe hoping that he's going to tweet out some final dramatic refrain, some desperate, anguished mea culpa that helps any of this make a modicum of sense? Or is this just what we do by default now? Famous Guy —> follow? Is it just that reflexive? Shouldn't we not be following a presumed terrorist, of all people? Earning followers is the equivalent of earning rewards in the social media ecosystems on our brave new world. So why feed this maniac's twisted ego by pledging our support on Twitter?

This deranged 19 year-old kid is already single-handedly shutting down a great American city with the threat of violence; now we're literally following him, by the tens of thousands, on a social media platform with global reach. So let's not. I for one refuse to follow this asshole anywhere.