Reddit apologises for Boston "Witch Hunt"
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Yes, Reddit is a platform. However, it's a platform that they do moderate- usually heavily. Reddit actually has quite a history of stopping witch hunts, ever since they started having problems with people posting user information, or inciting people to harass someone off-site. They've been quite successful at it, and the community is thankful.
However, those were always related to cases that didn't have any reason whatsoever to have large groups involved- they were to harass community members, some small-name celebrities, or people with opinions that are unpopular on Reddit. This was the first time that it was something that theoretically, Reddit could do some good with- and has had a bit of luck in doing this, albeit for much smaller crimes, in the past, by digging up license plate numbers, or giving advice that led to figuring a suspect out(usually stuff like hit and runs, or technology robberies).
Obviously, this taught them that there is no good time to let the Reddit hunt go. That it should always be moderated, every time, out of existence. You could say that they should've known that going in- but then again, CNN, The New York Post, Twitter, and HackerNews fucked this shit up as well. Everyone but the feds did. So get off the high horse.
I think that the idea of reddit finding peoples stolen bikes, phones, etc is typically less of an issue because of the scope of it. In this case the driving factor was fear and anger, much like what happened after 911.
The point as I see it is that you should never hunt for someone to blame out of fear or anger. And you are right many people did it, Steven Colbert had an awesome skit making fun of the Post. But here, HN is our community and to see that kind of behavior happen here is disappointing. I'd like to see a policy enacted where posts like that are brought down in the future and not allowed to go on.
Witch hunts are a major problem with this means of communication, it just lends itself well to it, and it needs to be stamped out. That's the point.
The Feds, for their "credit", have been burned by prematurely releasing investigative material before, and know that it can skew the information the receive...it generates more noise and lawsuits.
Not the case -- there were plenty of times (like the soldier kicking a puppy off a cliff) where most people would agree that identifying the perp would be a good thing. I'm not sure why they thought this incident would be different; the blog post doesn't articulate that directly.
This disappointing me on so many levels. No it is not everyone's fault but this sort of witch hunt is wrong and I'd suggest we downvote any sensationalized idea that 4chan or any other hacker can find the one or two guilty parties through online means.
I mean seriously... the front page of hacker news? I don't remember if it got to #1, but looking at it and up-voting it are two different things. We don't need that kind of smut here.
Not even close. I didn't [1][2] and generally don't agree with such discussion, but equating what went on here with Reddit is ridiculous.
The thread you linked on HN is primarily a discussion of the history and potential impacts speculation, not actual speculation. Yes, there are exceptions, but they are just that exceptions.
The situation in the now defunct /r/findbostonbombers was completely opposite with wild speculation, accusation, doxxing and everything inbetween.
1. Break off the users working on identifying suspects into a non-public sub-reddit (or other site) and anyone who wants to join should have to read about how to do this kind of work responsibly and read about what went wrong last time.
2. There should a warning to any reporters who try to join the closed site that this is a work in progress and nothing except the official status reports of the group should be reported on.
3. If anyone starts witch-hunting in the public threads then moderators and users (it should be part of reddediquite if it's not) should point those users to the closed forum. (and obviously immediately delete anything accusing a specific person.)
4. Like someone else also said, reporters need to be educated to not report directly from Reddit. It's the raw internet.
What do you guys think? What else could be done to improve the situation?
(And it would probably be really hard to "stamp" out anyway.)
By conflating them as you do, you're fighting a strawman who supposedly doesn't even want to curtail the harmful activity. But nobody is suggesting that.
The internet is raw, and people need to put their critical thinking hats on when digesting unfiltered data, speculation, and analysis.
People, the common and all kinds of people, on the other hand, would "talk". Whether online or offline, people talk about all types of things, good, bad or ugly. Reddit is like a platform which provides microphone to common people and it amplifies their talk. Just because people have opinion doesn't mean they should be highlighted in the newspaper.
Reddit and HN etc needs to decide if they are going to editorialize their platform or not. Apologizing after-the-fact makes no sense.
Second, the images reddit had were not the most up to date images possible. Had the bars uploaded their video, it is likely that reddit would have found the bombers the first night. They simply didn't have videos and photos that were up to date enough.
Third, the FBI had a press release around 2:00 Thursday saying they had identified the suspects and would release their images at 5:00 Thursday. (leaks were coming out earlier saying they had identified them as early as Friday morning).
Now, I understand that the FBI was probably following up on leads to locate them. But, they were not able to find them and while they were looking, the public was in grave danger.
I understand it is not good to name suspects on a public forum where we do not have enough evidence and I'm sure I would have been stressed had I been named, but the finger should be pointed at the police and we should start working toward better systems for law enforcement.
Those men planed on killing more people and could have carried out the second attack while the FBI was not releasing their identity. It is simply unacceptable that it took over 3 days to locate them in the video. I'm not saying reddit should be the system, but they need a better system to sort and analyze digital images and video.
The apology should come from the FBI.
2) "It is likely" isn't good enough. You're hypothesizing. Could they have found them? Maybe. Could they have not found them? Maybe. All we know is they didn't find the bombers but instead slandered a number of individuals and family names in the process.
3) I'm not sure what your background is but I like to believe that our federal law enforcement (FBI, Police, SWAT Teams, etc.), while not perfect, is pretty well-trained and collectively has thousands upon thousand of YEARS MORE experience than I do in collecting evidence, timing its release, and generally fighting crime. As such, I imagine the timed release was not to delay or elongate the process but was very intentional.
I do agree with you that it seemed to take longer than is desirable to find the suspects (especially since once they were found, one got away) but a "better system" is by no means the hive mind of untrained "armchair investigators."
Perhaps in the future there will be a way to crowd source information but the responses of Reddit 4chan, and yes, even some here on HN were well-intentioned but harmful. An apology from Reddit seems perfectly acceptable.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch-hunt#Metaphorical_usage
In this case, it is being used over judiciously which is why i take exception to it. The key to a witch hunt has to be a conviction and/or a hunt for a non-real cause. I'll even take a conviction to mean real harm (economic/physical etc.) not sanctioned by the government or sanctioned by he government. Reddit didn't result in this. He might have been nervous for a few hours, but he was not harmed. (That doesn't mean we don't need safeguards in place to prevent it).
>As such, I imagine the timed release was not to delay or elongate the process but was very intentional.
I agree that they used their past experience to set the delay, and I understand they probably had good logic for it. But, just because an organization made what they thought was the right decision, in this case it appears to not have been. As an outside observer it appears that their 1000s of years of experience failed them, and they need to explain why and issue an apology.
>I do agree with you that it seemed to take longer than is desirable to find the suspects (especially since once they were found, one got away) but a "better system" is by no means the hive mind of untrained "armchair investigators."
I agree that Reddit probably isn't the best system, but we do need to look at the potential use of crowds to solve cases like this more quickly. I read through all the reddit commentary and I didn't get the sense of hive mentality you describe, there was a lot of disagreement and people stating to be careful and not post their personal information etc. It wasn't perfect, but could have been effective had they had the right images.
>Perhaps in the future there will be a way to crowd source information but the responses of Reddit 4chan, and yes, even some here on HN were well-intentioned but harmful.
At worst they were "potentially" harmful, not actually harmful. Everyone is lucky nothing bad happened to those people whose pictures were circled, but we are equally lucky the attackers did not decide to bomb something in the 3 days after the incident.
It was sites like Reddit and publications like NY Post that forced their hand to release the photos because, again, rampant amateur detectives/vigilantism is dangerous and there had already been wrongly-identified suspects whose lives' were truly in immediate danger.
The FBI doesn't owe you an apology. They are trained professionals who were able to get a positive ID on the suspects ONLY THROUGH tedious, labor intensive poring over photography and video frames (the digital technology needed to accomplish this task of a reasonable positive ID is just not there today, there was another post on this on HN a day or so ago) and then ultimately through an eye-witness testimony from the guy recovering from getting his legs blown off in the hospital.
All sites like Reddit did was hinder or at the very least alter (perhaps the effect was adiaphorous or benign, perhaps not) the investigation. If it weren't for fear of a public witch hunt/lynch mob situation, it is possible that a much slimmer/streamlined law enforcement operation could have been set in motion to capture both brothers alive without locking down the entire city. But we'll never know will we because the public is full of blood lust and everybody was suddenly an amateur internet detective. Good intentions be damned, that type of reaction is poisonous.
This was a case where Reddit had mild success in the past, being able to figure out the license plates of hit-'n-run suspects, or thieves of various types. So, they thought that maybe they could do some good here.
Now they know otherwise: There is no right time for stuff like this. Ever. So, they go back to what they've done in the past to stop these, dozens, and dozens, and dozens of times: Heavier moderation of anything that could even possibly lead to someone's personal information.
They should have done this a week ago, but I won't discourage them from finally doing the right thing by nagging them about that.
It's not like they ran to join the military to invade Iraq for dubious reasons somehow impossibly tied to 9/11, so at least we are learning from past mistakes.
What people need to do is make a crowdsourcing app for the next time this happens to better focus all that willpower in the right direction.
Anyway, for now places like reddit and 4chan have far less influence than say CNN or Daily News so any damage they cause is far less.
A good crowdsourcing app would maybe have one-way data to "authorities" and not allow people to "gang up" on any individual.
I too am glad that they didn't get the right guy, that would have gave some justification to this kind of behavior. I do like the one-way data idea. That would be awesome.
we have an app-like thing for that, it is called a browser. I think the larger issue is that regardless of which medium being used, if the people are using it irresponsibly then there will always ALWAYS be the same witch-hunt.
There was a great comment on one of the few Boston bomber threads that I remember seeing on the front page (I'm browsing on my phone and will link to it when I get home). The crux of the commentor's thoughts were that if the internet community doesn't take responsibility for its actions then all it does is enhance the argument for tightening regulations in relation to the internet. how long does the government wait before censoring reddit and other message boards naming names?
When someone is wrongly accused and is arrested by citizens on a crusade?
When someone is wrongly accused and is lynched by citizens on a crusade?
all any of us can do is play our own part. Don't take part in witch hunting and call out those who do.
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So does this mean that HN is also apologizing? I think they should because there was enough carried over witch-hunt here as well.
You see, the BBC is reporting that Reddit apologized. Do you really think that there is such a thing called Reddit which has a capacity to apologize? Either the owners of Reddit can apologize or nobody. If the owners of Reddit apologized than do we believe that the group of public (which is mostly responsible for the witch-hunt) also apologized? How could they apologize as a collective group when they are not coherent as a visible entity?
The owners of such internet platforms should reflect on when their platform could be abused by the mass and they should interfere before it becomes a monster which cannot be tamed.
I actually agree, but I'm not sure that I would put that assertion to the force of law. There is then the conundrum of what happens in the face of selective enforcement (and there will be selective enforcement). Can someone then sue Reddit for not suppressing an investigation that doxxed them quickly enough, or at all, given that Reddit has suppressed other investigations?
If you do manage to always comply with a law saying this much it will only be by suppressing otherwise valid speech, which is also problematic. Also, can someone sue Reddit for being suppressed unnecessarily, or is it merely an inconvenience?
IANAL, TINLA, but I believe section 230 (c)(2) of the Communications Decency Act implies that reddit couldn't be sued for that: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230#c
>No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of (A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
The policy makers and the law probably have old-fashioned ideas on how this issue can be corrected, but can the online mass come up with their own solution, so the same type of issue is eliminated from repeating in the future?
While it's the nice thing to do in this case for the owners of Reddit to apologize, I'm not sure what meaning it really has, or should have. They don't have control over the people using their site. Things like this will continue to happen just as they always have.
I mean, I wouldn't expect Google to apologize because people sent threatening emails using a gmail.com address.
The previous large ones, like SomethingAwful, certainly don't.
In any case:
1. These aren't paid moderators. Reddit has paid admins, but not moderators, AFAIK. Expecting subreddit moderators to give a crap seems a bit far fetched.
2. I know of nowhere that rigidly applies rules. Even HN doesn't. I know the typical demographic for HN likes bright- line black/white rules, but it's just not the real world.
I think (I hope) that's what they are apologizing for.
Then the volunteers should report irresponsible shit to the paid employees.