Should Reddit Be Blamed for the Spreading of a Smear?

Not Reddit, but the user's of Reddit. The users that searched images for 'suspects' were doing vigilante work, or so they thought. It seems to me all they were doing was looking at every image and trying to spot the brown skin. They didn't look for any evidence or use any reasoning. So, again, the users that identified Sunil should be blamed.

Anybody remember the guy in Frederick, Maryland, whose life was pretty was all but destroyed by suspicion of involvement in the anthrax letters? Reddit wasn't part of that conversation; the mainstream press had a lot to do with it.

I already commented but I'm going to again, to make a different point.

This article is going to get a lot of traffic and it's talking about things that happened months ago. The take-away is: news stories don't need to be first to get attention and pageviews. They need to be informative, accurate, high-quality, well-written, and present new information.

Maybe too many professional journalists are caught up in the "game", where a big influx of traffic or Twitter followers is a dopamine hit similar to getting a bunch of upvotes on Reddit (or karma on HN).

But I have not seen proof that "being first", by itself, correlates to long-term professional success as a journalist. Often the things that journalists are trying to be first on, are things that everyone will know soon anyway--like who the FBI has named as a suspect. Is saying something 5 minutes before everyone else really worth the risk of getting it wrong? It's gambling with your professional reputation.

The value of being first is usually really the value of being "only". Look at Glenn Greenwald's articles about the NSA, or David Corn's article about Romney's "47 percent" comments. Sure, they were the first on those topics, but their real value was that they were the only people who could have reported those stories--because they were the only people who had the sources for previously hidden information.

So: if you're the first with a story because you have exclusive access to new, trustworthy information (in both Greenwald's and Corn's cases, they were primary sources with verifiable documentation), then it's good to be first.

But if you're just trying to shout the latest rumors into Twitter faster than the other 1,000 people, then you're really just rolling the dice.

In the modern, highly fractured media culture in the U.S., there are few commonly shared sources of information like the network news broadcasts, or the big papers like the NY Times, used to be.

Reddit fulfills that role for many people...but the problem is that there is zero editorial judgment involved in the "news" it reports. Information goes big based on emotional factors (OMG can you believe this), not rational or informative factors (I have definite proof this is true).

This is great for low-risk content like memes, jokes, personal anecdotes, interviews with celebrities or politicians, etc. But obviously it can be terrible for high-risk, or more serious subjects like cancer victim fundraisers (Reddit users have mistakenly crucified several) or in-progress news stories--where rumors, first impressions, and even eye-witness accounts are often wrong.

The entire "crowd sourced" online search for the Boston bombers was IMO really awful and embarrassing for Reddit, and for the young journalists who let themselves get sucked into the excitement.