April 20, 2013
The social networking site Reddit found itself in the middle of a terrible situation this week after it fingered a missing Brown student as one of the Boston Marathon bombers.
Reddit, for those unfamiliar, is a popular site that consists entirely of user-generated content. “Redditors,” or users, can either vote a post up or down. The site’s “front page” consists of its most popular posts. Reddit’s thousands of threads on every sort of topic, called “subreddits,” are moderated by volunteers.
Last summer, in a savvy move that ratified the influence of Reddit, President Obama participated in a Q & A on the site, called an AMA (for “ask me anything”). He was on the hunt for younger voters. Some of his opponent’s strategists hadn’t ever heard of the site.
This week, a new subreddit popped up: “FindBostonBombers.” Scouring the Internet for photos and clues, redditors decided to play detective. Things soon spiraled out of control.
A young woman who said she was a classmate of the missing Brown student, Sunil Tripathi, tweeted that she recognized him as one of the bombing suspects. Though she later made her Twitter account private, which means it was inaccessible to unapproved followers, someone posted an image of her tweet on Reddit on “FindBostonBombers.”
Continue at:
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-boston-bombing-reddit-learns-how-a-witch-hunts-can-start-20130420,0,5670679.story?track=lat-pick
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