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Comment by bherms | Hacker News Reader

It pisses me off that so many people are shaking their finger at the Reddit community over grief caused by falsely identifying this kid as the bomber... The real issue is that much of the media decided to do their reporting by going to what amounts to a message board of speculation and reporting it as if it were news. Yes, some users did get out of hand by posting on the family's website, but in reality, that can be summed up more easily by saying "assholes on the internet were assholes." Stop blaming the Reddit community for the entire debacle. It was only a small percentage of the users as well.

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There wasn't, as far as I can tell, any mainstream media reports about Sunil being involved in the Boston marathon bombing, the only accusations were from redditors tricked by a faked police scanner report that supposedly IDed him as the bomber.

Edit: A relevant comment from a journalist regarding the situation: http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/1cvb9b/reflections_on_...

    As a member of the reddit community, I was really disappointed with the 
    Sunil Tripathi debacle. D'you know why his name wasn't widespread in 
    the press as a suspect? Because generally we like to ask police for 
    confirmation on a suspect name before publishing it.

    If reddit users want to act like journalists, they should follow the same 
    procedures. You're not special just because it's "the internet"

When I was watching NBC the morning of the Watertown incident, during a phone interview, one of their 'chief investigative correspondents' said, he wouldn't say who, but a Brown University student that went missing in March was the prime suspect. Given what he did say, he might as well have given the name. Not excusing redditors by any means, but I did see it mentioned on national television, for what it's worth.

Reddit, the website, enabled the labeling of the victim. They apologized for it too[1]; they wouldn't have done so if they didn't recognize some kind of moral responsibility for what happened.

While no one should imply that every reddit user is responsible, a thought should be spared as to whether or not false accusations and mob hunts must be a fundamental part of social news. If so, it is worth spending the time asking ourselves how we can avoid it in the future; and if they are unavoidable, how we can limit the damage they cause (or, in the extreme case, if we even want to encourage the continued existence of social news sites like Reddit if the effects are judged too extreme).

[1]http://blog.reddit.com/2013/04/reflections-on-recent-boston-...

That's kind of how groups, from sports teams to entire nations, work. To greater or lesser extents, minorities do in fact very often represent the majority and greater entity in the public eye. It's usually futile to attempt to hide behind rationalizations (or, in this case, blame shifting). Groups often police themselves for this very reason.

Also, as mentioned elsewhere, the "media" didn't have all that much to do with this particular fiasco.

Yes, the any legitimate media outlets that reported Tripathi was one of the bombers screwed up big time. The reason I blame the Reddit users who were involved in initially accusing him is because they were very aware that the news media could, and likely would, report on their speculation. Early on in the /r/findbostonbombers subreddit rules were posted that specifically addressed the media. One of the rules stated was to not report on the speculation because it was just that. Frankly, I found that to be a naive and weak attempt and preemptively absolving themselves of their own misdeed.

Yeah, the media screwed up by reporting media but if I jump in the lion's cage at the zoo I'm not going to blame the lion if I get eaten.

I think people misunderstand what reddit is. It's not a media organisation. It's a place where anyone can join in on a conversation. People get together and they speculate.

I'm sure there were lots of people getting together in the "real world" and discussing those events and speculating.

I'm not sure there's anything wrong with people speculating about events, though it depends on how they do it and how they present their speculations and what they do on the basis of their speculations.

I'm offended by your broad and overreaching reference to "much of the media". Yes, some media did report it that way, but in reality, that can be summed up more easily by saying "sensationalist headlines drive clicks and newsstand sales". Stop blaming the media community. It was only a small percentage of the media (e.g., Springfield Daily Shopper, United Airlines Hemispheres(r) Magazine and mainstream TV media such as Home Shopping Network did not participate in Reddit vilification).

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