Teen: I Am Not the Boston Marathon Bomber

On the day of the bombing, they were reporting that the bomber had already been arrested. The day after the bombing, they had a picture on their cover of a backpack that was supposedly the bomb... except it wasn't. Today, they had a picture of two middle eastern looking people, who had nothing to do with the bombing. This is par the course for the NY Post.

My favorite though, is when I used to do political work, the NY Post would show up to large events, set up a quick photoshoot with paid actors, then leave, and whatever they staged a picture of would be the next day's front page.

Fuck the post.

Just as the WSJ published about people in custody, the lesson is clear: Do not bother listening to any Rupert Murdock publication for news.

The WSJ should just stick to finance, and the NYP should stick to whatever it is that it does well. (Remind me: What was it that the NYP does well?)

They optimize for units sold, not precise reporting.

I watched this going on all day yesterday. Certainly, there were many counterarguments and so on, but frankly the Reddit thread was a confused mess, with the same stuff getting posted over and over again, no coherent plan on organizing files by resolution or time, and no schema for IDing people, leading to multiple subthreads like 'I think this guy looks super-fishy' 'Which guy there's 100 people in that photo, who do you mean?' 'In the middle, on the left, once you've seen him you can't un-see him.' I don't think the Reddit community or subreddit moderators were at fault, but their search were nowhere near as well organized as you suggest.

What happened in the case of the runner kids is that another forum, AR15.com (dedicated to gun enthusiasts, as you might guess) pretty much decided that these two guys were guilty (based largely on the early photo speculations showing backpacks looking large enough to hold a pressure cooker). then one of the members decided to post on the Facebook page of the teenager in the blue tracksuit, which was then noticed by a Reddit user who was also watching the AR15.com thread (not me).

The teen saw the post on his Facebook page, stated that he had nothing to do with it and immediately contacted law enforcement; At this point the subReddit moderator went through and cleaned up the old threads and so forth. IIRC the 'non-suspect' went to a court building or a police station (wherever the investigation HQ is) straight away, and later returned to post an update on his FB page. The ar15.com folks meanwhile ostracized the person who had posted the link on the FB page and convinced themselves that they're all targets now (that community is heavily invested in the idea that it should be Muslim terrorists, presumably because they're feeling sensitive over the gun control issue).

I don't mean this as a criticism of the Reddit folks, who were doing their best. I'm posting this more to observe that social media in general does not do that great of job at this kind of thing. EDIT: I think social media and crowds can do a great job of that, but it needs pretty strict.active moderation and a gameplan at the outset. That proceduralism slows down people who want to dive right in and help straight away, but it also helps to eliminate false positives.

And all that nuance is immediately lost once someone posts the photo on Facebook or Twitter. Unfortunately, that's the issue at hand.

Even if 99 comments out of 100 on Reddit or whatever other forum are doubtful, there is still the fact that his name has been publicized incorrectly - which would not have happened in the absence of a public witch hunt.

The umbrella man is my favorite falsely accused bystander - I mean he looked SO GUILTY!

I guess I am proof. And so is 'jaredsohn (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5562975 -- "Closer up view of person in OP (includes shot of face): http://i.imgur.com/BBxplgk.jpg " -- it was his interpretation from Reddit comments that Salah was one possible suspect).

There's a lot of truth to 'untog's comment up above that no matter the nuance and diligence being practiced, Reddit is still an open and public forum and no amount of nuance is worth anything when stuff leaks out of Reddit.

This widely circulated spreadsheet [3] contains a "suspect summary", not a list of "somewhat interesting people".

1: http://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/1cf5wp/2013_boston_m...

2: http://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/1cf5wp/2013_boston_m...

3: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?key=0AgtCl8YvqiBodEl0...

Sounds vaguely like how the US justifies torture.

Only the raw classification and identification data is valuable here. The feedback cycles created by public discourse and news media are terribly flawed and often very harmful. It would be much better to use an automated back end to process the data, seek further verification and then ultimately bring it to the attention of human investigators.

"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer",

...as expressed by the English jurist William Blackstone in his seminal work, Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in the 1760s. It is worth note that the actual numbers are not generally seen as important, so much as the idea that the State should not cause undue or mistaken harm "just in case". Historically, the details of the ratio change, but the message that government and the courts must err on the side of innocence is constant.

it doesn't matter what you call it or what the intent was; you cannot argue that this kid is clearly shaken up and it's affected his family deeply.

In this case, same thing.

> The crowd came up with a theory, that theory was sent to the authorities, and the suspect went to the police preemptively.

And you really have no idea why this process might have caused Salah Barhoun to experience genuine fear for his safety and the safety of his family? Not to mention all the anxiety any normal, thinking person experiences when having to deal unexpectedly with both the national media and the police?

"Posting on the Internet" is not.