TK things I saw happen in /r/findbostonbombers this week
I must have started really using Reddit on a regular basis sometime in the last two years or so, quietly, at night, on my phone, using the Alien Blue app on the "dark" setting, mostly while getting a toddler to bed, or sitting up in the middle of the night trying to get a kid to go back to sleep.
I've gone through a couple usernames, and really haven't said anything too controversial, but it is a bit of a "safe" space for me when it comes to making extra-snarky jokes that are too silly for Twitter, or too unfriendly for Facebook. If you've known me long enough, you might be able to figure out who I am on Reddit, but rest assured: I'm not important. I mostly read, often upvote, occasionally comment, and rarely post a link to something funny or newsworthy.
So what have I been doing obsessively refreshing /r/findbostonbombers since Tuesday morning?
First, here's what happened Monday:
Very few amateur pictures of horrible things, because cell phone service went down immediately following said horrible things.*
Professional pictures and video led on traditional news and social media, the best of which came from the AP and the Boston Globe, because there they were, literally rolling while the explosions happened. (Once again, mad props to the shooters who moved toward the scene to document, rather than running for cover. These are sports or local photographers, not necessarily men and women with experience in war zones.)
On social media, the same pictures went around again and again that afternoon and early evening. Many of these were just pictures or videos of TV screens running professional video. Did someone really call a Vine of a TV screen the future of journalism? Or the destiny of video? Or something like that? Did that happen?
Then everyone got home, and the pictures and video started moving to the social networks.Â
The first package of pictures I saw mentioned on Twitter involving online folks trying to do some detective work with public photos was called "4chan ThinkTank" and it was as bizarre and random and ill-advised as you'd expect if you're at all familiar with 4chan, but it was a start.
I must have gone to Reddit to look for some sort of structured discussion about that photoset, and found the new subreddit, /r/findbostonbombers, where people were posting sets of photos and video as they found them, cross-referencing photos of debris that had ended up public in foreign news sources, and poring over them trying to find matches to the backpacks, bulges, people who have bags and then don't, etc.
Why try to outrun the FBI at this? For glory? To help? Maybe just to try to feel useful?
What good could come of this?
Horrible things. I won't link to any photos that I saw, because the deeper I went into this, especially on Tuesday, the more heartbreaking it was. If you want to look at pictures of a live person that quickly turns into a dead person, be my guest, go at it. I don't need that again. I flashed back to when I stopped clicking when Andy Carvin warned that a picture or video was graphic. No thank you. Nope. Nope. Nope.
Reasonable things: I saw a logical exploration of the photos, people trying to create meaningful before/after diagrams, and find the best quality photos to do it with. This was no small task. Someone tried to build a Photosynth. (Remember the promise of that software?) Others shared PSDs with their diagrams to build on. And one by one, people were ruled out who at first might have looked suspicious, notably including the pair who ended up on the New York Post front page. /r/findbostonbombers had them in the innocent pile long before the Post. Sorry, guys.
Let's stop here for a moment.
I was following /r/findbostonbombers closely at this point, and not really paying attention to the threads in other subreddits.Â
Here's how subreddits work. There are many of them. So many. Anyone can create one and moderate it. So Oops777 created a subreddit to concentrate threads for people trying to look through the public evidence and connect the dots. Here's Buzzfeed's story on him.
There were plenty of other threads in other subreddits. More on that in a moment.
Remember that time they said they had pictures and video and then somebody said they had a name and then somebody else said they had already made an arrest and they were on their way to the courthouse and...yeah so that was a bad day.
But the effect on the conversations I was watching that afternoon went something like "well, we've narrowed it down to a few possibilities, think it's one of THESE GUYS?!" ...and those were the guys the New York Post ran out front on Thursday. I don't know how that happened, or how they make decisions, but by the time the paper ran that on Thursday morning, everyone in that thread on Reddit knew it was a local high school track runner and his coach. Watching the marathon. Because that's what they do.
The subreddit I had been watching was getting really slow. Many, many people spotted in the pictures and videos available had been ruled out. There wasn't much activity.Â
And then, pretty much simultaneously, the authorities announced they (really) had photos and video this time, and they'd be releasing them at 5pm -- AND -- a local TV station ran a crappy still from some different video that highlighted the "white hat guy" who MIGHT have shown up once or twice in the images in the subreddit, but not with his face showing.
For the hour or more between that photo and the official FBI release, there was some pretty wild speculation. If you have theories about gestalt and pattern recognition sorts of things you'd like to fuel with an example, go watch people talk about whether that looks an awful lot like a Guy Fawkes mask he's wearing. (He wasn't, the image quality was just crap.)
And then, at 5pm, the FBI released the pictures, making the subreddit somewhat moot. All of the image analysis had been for naught: We hadn't found these guys.
But, once the images were out, there was another burst of "hey, that guy's in this other picture," which led to the "is this shopped?" discussion that @pbump won. (The AP has tracked down the original source, because reporting.)
I first saw the mention of the missing Brown student in a single comment in a single thread with a link to a blogspot blog about his disappearance. I dug around, looked at the pictures on the family's Facebook Page for the search, and it was all very, very inconclusive. But, a curious lead to look into.
It spread on /r/findbostonbombers pretty quickly, but within a couple hours, the mods (remember Oops777?) of the subreddit started deleting all mentions of his name. They had made strict rules about not using names, and frankly, I think if he hadn't been missing, no one would have slapped his name on the page.
So that's one reason I wanted to document my experience with Reddit this week: In one breath, much of the writing about Reddit we've seen today has conflated the hunt on /r/findbostonbombers with the incorrect and insensitive spread of the name of the missing Brown student as a potential suspect.
Several hours before his name turned on Twitter in a weird series of amateur errors and uninspired decisions, now well-documented by Alexis Madrigal, the subreddit that was getting the most media attention had already removed his name from the record. It was gone.
But not from other subreddits, and especially on Thursday night, once the FBI pictures and video were released, the big threads on subreddits like /r/worldnews dominated the discussion on the Reddit front page (or the /all page if you're like me and usually ignore things like news or politics on Reddit by choice).
The thing is, I care a little too much about the naming of things. Longtime followers have seen me wring my hands about this sort of thing before. So when you say "newspapers" or "media" or "Reddit" or "Twitter" and you're talking about all news organizations or all people who use Reddit or Twitter, I cringe, and I cringe hard.Â
I've defended CNN to Redditors this week, and I've defended Redditors to journalists at national news organizations, and I've tried not to be judgmental, unless you're livetweeting the scanner without any context or attribution, for the love of all things good in the world.
One of the reasons the amateur sleuths failed so miserably is because they didn't have useful tools for sorting this sort of information. And another reason? Collaboration is messy. It's wet. And an anonymous network of strangers with a wide variety of skills and attitudes and tools is just... well, it's hard to be useful.
This wasn't crowdsourcing, this was just chaos with threaded comments and upvotes and imgur galleries.
Transparency
I've been /u/carboniteface on Reddit for the last year or so. I deleted a few comments today (on old threads on other topics) that were a little too personal for public consumption. I'll stop using that account now, but I'll see you on Reddit.
* Mobile phone service went down after the explosions from the usual crush of a gazillion people trying to use their phones for data all at once, not due to some brilliant police ability to shut down service from multiple providers in a small range of blocks to prevent the use of signals to trigger IEDs, but wouldn't that be impressive.
UPDATE: Look, I'm not going to make this an all-inclusive account of l'affaire /r/findbostonbombers, but a few notable things have happened since I published this:
The aforementioned creator of the subreddit took it down, possibly with some (rare!) encouragement from Reddit staff. Here's a Q & A with Oops777 in the Atlantic Wire.
In this post on the official Reddit blog, Reddit (the company, not the aggregate of users, eh?) weighs in: "However, though started with noble intentions, some of the activity on reddit fueled online witch hunts and dangerous speculation which spiraled into very negative consequences for innocent parties....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."
Yesterday, police pulled a body out of the Providence River that could be the missing Brown student.
