In the wake of tragedy, communities try to find ways to help each other. As social media is made up of communities, it's no exception that the same logic would apply. So when no one claimed credit for the Boston Marathon bombings and no suspects were initially identified, some online communities took it upon themselves to aid law enforcement and try to find possible suspects by crowdsourcing the thousands of images and videos for potential bombers. The most organized of them was in a community called "FindBostonBombers" (now closed) on Reddit, one of the largest social news sites.
As of April 19, the subreddit had about 9,000 members. The declared point of the subreddit was "...nothing more than one single place for people to compile, analyze, and discuss images, links, and thoughts about the Boston Bombing." They also say, "FindBostonBombers is a discussion forum, not a journalistic media outlet. We do not strive, nor pretend, to release journalist-quality content for the sake of informing the public."
The biggest problem is, of course, that while moderation of the group can prevent some unwanted behavior in terms of posting, there's no way to enforce the behavior of anyone who reads the site. If it were purely discussion in an isolated room that'd be one thing; but anyone can read it and act upon it. No amount of disclaimers can truly prevent that from happening.
Which is what traditional media who reported on Reddit should have said. Instead, some reporters took it as an opportunity to offer helpful advice. Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic gently reminded Reddit, "Guys, this isn't dissecting the quality of an animation on the PS3." He also went on to remind readers that "San Francisco, the city where Reddit grew up, has an ugly history of vigilantes deciding to track down and convict suspects." (The association logically being that the "San Francisco Committee of Vigilance" probably has much to do with Reddit's relocating from Virginia to San Francisco in 2006, despite the Committee being disbanded 150 years earlier.)
Not that Madrigal was alone. Ryan Chittum took time away from his traditional business reporting at the Columbia Journalism Review to write an article subtitled "While Reddit fails again." And Slate's Farhad Manjoo lumped Reddit with the New York Post when Reddit wrongly identified suspects. (Though his colleague Will Oremus at least admits that no one made the Post publish their pictures on the front page.)
Before we go on, it's important to remember a couple of salient facts about Reddit:
- Last month Reddit had almost 64 million unique visitors
- There are 5,000 active communities
Put another way, Madrigal et al. felt that 0.014% of a website's user base basically represented the rest of the site. It's about the same directing comments about the actions of half of the people who live on an average city block in Manhattan to the whole island. I'm reasonably sure that these journalists aren't (that) willfully ignorant of how Reddit works.
So when these and other journalists who condescend to social media when they get things wrong, it reeks of a few things, but mostly smugness and fear. Which is great for page views, but not really productive for fixing social media.
Social media has empowered people in ways never seen before. And given that they are people, they're going to make mistakes. Lots of them. And sometimes they'll hurt innocent people, and they'll be wrong for doing so. For example, when talking about how Reddit misidentified a missing Brown University student as a potential bomber, Manjoo admitted, "Caught up in the excitement of breaking news, I was one of many journalists who retweeted news that the Brown student was one of the suspects-a fact which, in the morning, I feel absolutely terrible about." (Apparently he's learned a lot about journalism since then.)
But the reality is this: there's no guarantee that social media can be prevented from doing this again in the future. We can try to create a culture of getting stories right instead of getting them first, but much traditional media has already done away with that idea. Plus, it's a lot easier for them to cast blame on new technologies than it is to change behaviors.
As last week proved, social media can be an unpredictable, uncontrollable force. It's important to critique it and to think of ways it can be tempered, especially during crises. Patronizing journalists should set examples for how social media ideally would be used. Blaming people who only wanted to help won't make your jobs any more secure.