r/FindBostonBombers

» see reddit.com/r/findbostonbombers as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Two bombs went off near the finish line of the Boston Marathon on 15 April 2013. The next day somebody created a subreddit called r/findbostonbombers, on the theory that thousands of people examining the same crowd photographs in parallel would find something investigators had missed. By 17 April it had passed three thousand members. At its last public snapshot it had 7,240.

It is worth being precise about what the people running it thought they were doing, because the archived page says so directly. The subreddit's own title read "dedicated to help find the bombers (and also to clear the names of those who are innocent)". The sidebar asked for "a middle ground populated with debate tempered with cautious restraint" and asked viewers to pursue the goal dispassionately. Nobody set out to accuse anyone. The rules were written by people who had anticipated exactly the failure that followed and believed a stated norm would prevent it.

It did not prevent it. When the FBI released photographs of two suspects on 18 April, the comparison work that had been going on for two days produced names. Several of them belonged to people with no connection to anything, including a 17-year-old track athlete called Salah Barhoun. One of them was Sunil Tripathi.

~ the dossier ~

~ six days ~

Sunil Tripathi was a student at Brown University who had gone missing in mid-March, a month before the bombing. Somebody thought one of the FBI images resembled him. The suggestion moved from a comment to a thread to Twitter inside a few hours, and by the night of 18 April his name was circulating faster than anything a correction could travel alongside. His family had been running a public search for him, which meant his photograph was already online and easy to pick up.

He had nothing to do with it. He had died before the bombing happened. His body was recovered from the Seekonk River on 23 April, and in the days before that his family had to field a wave of accusations about a son who was already gone. The actual suspects were identified on 19 April and the second of them was in custody by that night. The name that had been circulating kept circulating for days afterward.

~ what it cost ~

Reddit's general manager Erik Martin published a post called "Reflections on the Recent Boston Crisis" on 22 April. It conceded that activity on the site "fueled online witch hunts and dangerous speculation which spiraled into very negative consequences for innocent parties". One of the subreddit's moderators had already apologized to the Tripathi family for any part in relaying what turned out to be wrong.

The closure itself is tightly dated and it has been reported loosely. Over the preceding weekend the moderators had hidden the subreddit behind a custom stylesheet, which made the page look empty while leaving it online. The real switch came on the evening of 22 April: the Internet Archive has a normal 15 KB public page at 19:59 UTC and, thirty four minutes later, a 403 reading "the moderators of this subreddit have set it to private." Reddit did not ban it. The people who had opened it six days earlier closed it themselves, a few hours after the company apologized.

~ what replaced it ~

I watched the manhunt the way most of the world did, as wall-to-wall television from six time zones away, and I was not on Reddit for any of it. What I remember from Turkey is the live coverage of a city told to stay indoors. The part that mattered here was happening in a forum I would not have thought to open, and it reached the television anyway.

Reddit changed how it handled this. When a gunman attacked the Washington Navy Yard that September, the site shut down naming attempts rather than letting another one grow. The phrase "internet detectives" stopped being a compliment around 2013 and has not recovered. Six days is not long enough to build a community, but it was long enough to demonstrate that good intentions and a careful sidebar are not a procedure, and that a crowd with photographs will always produce a name whether or not there is one to find.

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