Boston bombs: Reddit sorry for online ‘witch hunt’

Much has been made of how the mainstream media got it wrong in the days after the Boston Marathon bombing.

The New York Post was criticised for wrongly reporting that 12 people had died in the explosions, while America’s respected radio service, NPR, reported that a third suspect had been arrested.

The accuracy bar tends to be set lower online – especially for user-generated sites. But now the online forum Reddit has officially apologised for the consequences of hosting speculation – which turned out to be wrong – about who carried out the fatal Boston marathon bombing, raising questions about how far online speculation in the throes of breaking news should be allowed to go.

Some of the activity on Reddit fuelled online witch hunts and dangerous speculation which spiralled into very negative consequences for innocent parties. Erik Martin, Reddit

Some Reddit users had already apologised to the family of missing college student Sunil Tripathi, 22, who many users accused of carrying out the attacks. The Tripathi family was forced to take down a Facebook page created to try and find Sunil after negative comments connecting him to the bombing were posted.

And on Monday night, Reddit’s general manager Erik Martin issued an unreserved apology for the spiralling of accusations.

“Though started with noble intentions, some of the activity on Reddit fuelled online witch hunts and dangerous speculation which spiralled into very negative consequences for innocent parties,” he wrote.

“We all need to look at what happened and make sure that in the future we do everything we can to help, and not hinder, crisis situations.”

“The Reddit staff and the millions of people on Reddit around the world deeply regret that this happened,” Mr Martin added.

Could it happen again?

Despite the apology, Reddit put forward no alternative or solution to stem the tidal wave of wrong accusations, as Slate.com also pointed out. Sites which are essentially discussion forums can legally claim “mere conduit” exception: in the eyes of the law – and the users – they merely facilitate discussion rather than editorialise, and are protected accordingly.

It is interesting to note that Reddit had a policy about persecuting individuals which it chose not to enforce here. Professor Lorna Woods, City Law School

And in the UK, even post-Leveson, the situation is still unclear, says Professor Lorna Woods, of the City Law School.

“While Leveson raised the question of the press behaviour in pre-trial and investigative phases – essentially witch hunts – it is not clear that Leveson would have a profound affect here as the scope of any press regulation, even self regulation, is contested,” she told Channel 4 News.

“It is interesting to note that Reddit had a policy about persecuting individuals which it chose not to enforce here,” she added.

FBI ‘opened the door’

Following the official apology, the user (or “redditor”) who started the controversial thread deleted their account. Oops77 came under fierce criticism from other users after admitting that he regretted his decision to start the thread.

Self-appointed cyber-sleuths used the Find Boston Bombers thread to post comments, photos and video in an attempt to identify the bombers. At its peak, the site had 272,000 users, with 85,000 alone on the news update thread alone, as Reddit users pieced together pictures and information at the scene.

Speculation increased after the FBI itself posted photos and videos in a plea for information about the suspects.

“The FBI kind of opened the door,” said Hanson R Hosein, director of the University of Washington master of communication in digital media program.

“It was almost like it was put up as challenge to them, and they rose to it… They can be either really helpful or mob rule.”

Reddit: ‘We were wrong’

But Mr Martin said the process of crowd-sourcing information had resulted in a “witch hunt”.

“We hoped that the crowd-sourced search for new information would not spark exactly this type of witch hunt. We were wrong,” he wrote. “The search for the bombers bore less resemblance to the types of vindictive internet witch hunts our no-personal-information rule was originally written for, but the outcome was no different.”

But Dave Maass of the US-based Electronics Frontier Foundation is hopeful.

He told Channel 4 News:

“Citizen-driven investigations aren’t a should-they/should-they-not proposition. It’s just the necessary product of an age where everyone has instant, direct access to information while traditional media resources dwindle.

“Mistakes will happen, but like any evolutionary process, there will be a natural auto-correct.”

Whether the site’s mea culpa changes anything or not, the unusual acknowledgement of error indicates the widening grey area when it comes to breaking news and accountability – to the facts, as well as to the law.