Yet another attempt to harness the magnificent power of the interwebz demonstrated conclusively that 1000 people can be just as wrong as one. According to the Atlantic Wire, the reason the FBI release photos of the Tsarnaev brothers was to "fend off Reddit and the New York Post."
The social media site and notorious tabloid emerged as front runners in the race to distribute potentially useful but ultimately useless information in the early days of the investigation. The Post identified a Saudi suspect and reported 12 people were killed in the initial blasts. Both were not true. They then identified two people on their Thursday BAG MEN cover as F.B.I. suspects. That was also not true. Meanwhile, Reddit was on the case early looking at every picture possible trying to identify potential suspects. "I’d take thousands of people over a select few very smart investigators any day," one moderator said of the Boston suspect hunting sub-Reddit. Except, they didn't find a thing, and only helped add to the confusion surrounding the case.
Reflecting the two greatest virtues of the digital age, speed and the power of crowds, both the sub-Redditors and the Post managed to screw up royally. Way to go.
As many of us watched the unfolding news reports following the Boston Marathon bombing, it was impossible not to recognize that reports contradicted each other from channel to channel, with breathless anchors trying desperately to fill air time when they had nothing to say. It wasn't long before the Al Qaeda pundits were out in force, screen shots of Al Jazeera graced the tube and chicken little was screaming about the apocalypse. A disgraceful display of irrelevance in the rush to pretend otherwise.
But the internet is better than that. Where the mainstream media is impotent, the virtual citizenry was on the case.
The F.B.I. wanted to limit the damage being done" to people being wrongly identified by Reddit or the Post or any other amateur sleuthing being done. Once they were able to identify which faces in the crowd were the suspects late on Wednesday afternoon, they had a decision to make. The fear was that if they didn't head off the Internet's Sherlock Holmes approach early, then all-out chaos would ensue during the investigation.
People who had nothing whatsoever to do with the bombings were outed and accused. Their names, faces, will be forever emblazoned on the internet as bombers who weren't. All because of religion that adores the brilliance of the crowd over actual thought.
This leaves us with two problems, the first being the harm done to those individuals who were accused of being the bombers but weren't. It's no small thing for someone to have half the internet accusing them of a horrific crime in perpetuity when there was nothing, absolutely nothing, to support such an accusation. But hey, it's the internet. It's not like anyone believes anything you see there right? Not a future employer. Not an educational institution. Not a potential spouse. Nobody.
The other aspect is that no one is responsible. When one person points a finger, at least you know who it is. When it's the accumulated wisdom of thousands, who's to blame? The hive mentality of the crowd allows each participant to point to the guy next to him and say, "well, he said so, and I just went along with the crowd." There was once a time when the fact that a lot of people said something, thought something, was a less than adequate substitute for being right. Remember that whole earth is flat thing?
There is strength in numbers. If a lot of people say so, then it must be, no matter how utterly wrong and baseless it is. And the internet is nothing if not numbers. You don't know who these people are, what they know, how smart or stupid they are, how credible they are. You know nothing about them. You have no clue whether they have something worthwhile to offer or are blowing smoke. You don't know.
And yet, thousands are thrilled to embrace any bit of stupid on the internet at the speed of, well, the internet.
Was it fun playing junior detective? Was it cool to try to beat out the mainstream media? You certainly got the Post to bite, even though that's a bit like waging war against the French.
But you hurt people who didn't deserve to be hurt. Is that what the crowd had in mind? Are you proud of yourselves for that?
Like any tool, the internet offers vast opportunity to disseminate information in a flash and help to illuminate and inform, particularly where other media sources are invariably behind the time curve or bound up in whatever tangent some assistant producer thought visually appealing hours ago.
But like any tool, it can be used poorly, or be the wrong tool for the job. In this instance, it was a bludgeon used to pound innocent people. It was the wrong tool in the wrong hands, and harm ensued. This is a warning for Redditors, or any other collective group of self-empowered digital detectives with more time than grasp. Crowds are not magic. Crowds don't inherently know things. People who know things know things, and you aren't one of them.
The strength in numbers that comes from crowdsourcing not only magnifies the harm you can do, but covers the responsibility for doing such harm. Yet everyone who hid behind the numbers is individually responsible for their contribution to digital stupidity and the ruin of an innocent person's life. For crying out loud, get a grip and remember that this isn't a game for your amusement.
You have no greater right to harm people than anyone else, so if you don't have a clue what you're talking about, shut up. Just because you're part of the crowd doesn't mean you have anything worthwhile to offer or that you bear no responsibility for doing harm.
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Source: http://blog.simplejustice.us/2013/04/22/strength-in-numbers.aspx?ref=rss
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