Stop Blaming Reddit for the Boston Bomber Witch Hunt

Over the course of a tragic and bizarre week, the work of amateur sleuths on Reddit led to at least one innocent man being publicly misidentified as a suspect in the Boston bombings. A sect of Reddit users gathered on the now-infamous thread r/findbostonbombers became convinced that Sunil Tripathi, a Brown student who'd gone missing days prior, had been sighted near the scene and was a prime suspect. He was not. His image and name were eventually splashed across more conventional media after they were pulled from the threads, which lead to much unnecessary grief for an already grieving family.

Users on 4Chan and Reddit also picked out a couple of teenagers carrying duffel bags, and idly added them to the list of suspects, which was basically a list of nonwhite males with backpacks who happened to be photographed at the Boston Marathon. Then, apropos of next to nothing, the New York Post slapped the image of their faces across its front page, all but indicting the young athletes. One of the boys pictured rushed to the Boston PD, in tears, to clear his name.

So, today, Reddit's administrators apologized. In a post called 'Reflections on the Recent Boston Crisis,' an administrator writes that "some of the activity on reddit fueled online witch hunts and dangerous speculation which spiraled into very negative consequences for innocent parties. The reddit staff and the millions of people on reddit around the world deeply regret that this happened. We have apologized privately to the family of missing college student Sunil Triphathi, as have various users and moderators. We want to take this opportunity to apologize publicly for the pain they have had to endure."

Which was the right thing to do, basically. Things did get mobby on r/findbostonbombers, and the hive mind mentality certainly helped baseless theories to cement into actual accusations. But is this really Reddit's fault? Blaming "Reddit"—or accepting "Reddit"'s apology—should seem kind of bizarre. It's kind of like blaming a highway for a car crash that took place on an overpass. Sure, there's the chance that the crash was caused by a design flaw in the infrastructure, but more often than not, it's the result of one or more assholes smashing into each other.

And that's what happened here, above all—a bunch of assholes' ideas smashed into one another, and a digital mob was born. But is it Reddit's fault that some of its users were able to organize a witch hunt on its platform? And if so, which part of Reddit was to blame? The community in general? The administrators'?

That's hard to say. There's a case to be made, I suppose, that the admins should have seen the speculation getting out of hand and killed the subreddit. But if they had, wouldn't the search simply have continued elsewhere? Moderators did lock certain threads down, and they simply sprung up again elsewhere, on Reddit and off. Those dumb photos with "suspects" circled in red MS paint were bouncing around on Twitter, 4Chan, Facebook, Infowars, and who knows where else.

Reddit was just the most highly-trafficked highway where users were driving around aimlessly looking for people that resembled the popular conception of terrorists. If you close a single onramp, they'll move on to the next one. And surely the ever-vigilant media would be able to follow them, and continue to publicize the half-baked theories posited on another discussion forum. The Reddit group actually attempted—in vain, yeah—to set guidelines to try to prevent a witch hunt from escalating. I didn't see any Twitter admins step forward and say 'careful what you tweet, guys' after the bombing broke out.

Which is to say, you can't really blame Reddit for the fact that information is so easy to share, faceless digital mobs so easy to form. Reddit is a convenient scapegoat, because it is the biggest and most active such channel for organizing this kind of information. But this isn't a Reddit problem, it's an Internet problem. For all the braying and scolding coming from the sharpest-tongued media critics, I didn't see any useful alternatives put forward. "Knock off the vigilantism." Cut it out, guys. Don't do that, Reddit, you single-minded Borg-mass that surely must respond in unison to press criticism. Seriously, how was chastising one group of anonymous social media users congregating on a single platform supposed to stop people everywhere from sharing potentially inflammatory photos around the web?

Again, Reddit itself is mostly architecture. Its users are a diverse lot that includes teenage students, airline pilots, engineers, plumbers, government workers and Gawker writers. Like any massive, diverse group, some members—even subgroups—are going to exert poor judgment sometimes. Some of them are certainly going to get excited with loads of media 'evidence' at their fingertips and an intense desire to help make sense of a senseless calamity. Which is why it is unfair to single out Reddit, but perfectly reasonable to point at those who made the wildest accusations, and those who cheered them on. Because there are also many Reddit users who abhored the whole practice—hundreds of them devoted a subreddit to condemning the rampant speculation of r/findbostonbombers. It's user behavior across the social media landscape that we found unsavory, that spread lies about innocent people; nothing that was specifically endemic to Reddit.

I am glad that some of the individual Reddit users who led the witch hunt reached out and apologized to the families of the victims they slandered; they're the ones most at fault, not the community at large. It's tempting to view Reddit as this monolithic force for mischief and juvenility that should be scolded in toto when its users behave badly. That imagined monoculture gives us bloggers and online journalists—especially those of us who weren't on the ground in Boston, who weren't combing through evidence ourselves, who weren't listening in on the BPD's police tracker 24/7—an easy target to criticize for some cheap catharsis. Leave the sleuthing and the journalism to the pros, you sheep, you amateurs: clearly you too should be spending your time making fun of those attempting in vain to help out the Boston PD (after it made an appeal to the public).

More than pointing fingers at Reddit, we should recognize that this newish phenomenon of 'crowd-sleuthing' is simply a function of the increased transmissability of data. It's something people are going to do, and it can absolutely have pernicious real-world impacts. Perhaps we should try to prepare a more suitable platform for it; maybe one that provides for some degree of privacy while online conspiracy theorists rabble away and allows them to send their speculations to the authorities without making them public.

Or maybe Reddit and other forums will learn a lesson from this extreme case, with its truly unfortunate fallout, and will better self-regulate the next go round. Or maybe still, the professional media—you know, that thing with the trained, and paid, reporters and editors—won't snap up every compelling photo circulating on an online discussion board and plaster it across its pages. That would probably help too.