Jason Bagent's List: Boston Marathon Bombing and Social Media

• A quarter of Americans got information about the devastating explosions and the hunt for the bombers on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, according to a report out Tuesday from the Pew Research Center. Young Americans in particular kept up-to-date through social media.

• Yet while social network updates can feed a news-hungry audience with relevant and interesting updates, they can also breed false information, says social media expert Dave Kerpen, CEO of the social media marketing firm Likeable Media.

  As people on social media, including journalists, sometimes conveyed wrong information last week, "it was challenging to know what (sources) to trust," he says.

  Even Kerpen accidentally shared incorrect information. He can't recall what it was -- he deleted it from his Twitter feed and apologized for posting it.

• On Monday, social media site Reddit acknowledged its role in helping to disseminate false information, saying, "Some of the activity on reddit fueled online witch hunts and dangerous speculation."

  Reddit also said it apologized to the family of missing Brown University student Sunil Tripathi, who was misidentified on social media as a bombing suspect.

  Another challenge for social media users in the wake of a tragedy: figuring out what is appropriate to share and what is not. For instance, some social media users posted graphic images of bombing victims.

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• Social media have proven extremely volatile in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings. Two days after the bombings, Fast Company posted a blog entitled “The Modern Tool In Terror Investigations: Your Phone,” which explained how the mass adoption of smartphones has enabled instant transmission of pictures or short films to ever-greater publics on the myriad of Web 2.0 networks — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc. The article dramatically asserts that once the public realized the power of handheld technology, “culture shifted, just a little.” Maybe. In some ways public response to the bombing marks the new kind of public intervention and collaboration with the government. But many questions remain about the kind of surveillance provided by a technologically fortified and massively, instantaneously connected populace.
• As the FBI called on the public to participate, a surge of vigilante activity overwhelmed public conversations.  Reddit users combed the contents of their subreddit group r/FindBostonBombers targeting “suspicious” individuals at the scene
• In 2013, the Boston Marathon bombings illustrate how quickly rational public conversation can devolve under the massive pressure of highly instantaneous and impulsive exchanges of social media.

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• As cell phone service was rumored to have shut down, journalists and spectators alike took to social media and online tools to report the scene.

    

  Twitter was active worldwide yesterday, with the #BostonMarathon hashtag trending around the globe.
• A Vine video of the explosions has gone viral. A Boston Marathon volunteer hosted a Reddit AMA on site. Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley, who ran the marathon, live-tweeted events from the scene, and YouTube set up a dedicated channel compiling all videos related to the events, including President Obama's press statement.
• Google launched its Person Finder, offering a place for people to seek and post information about missing people. Boston.com created a Google Docs spreadsheet to connect people who needed a place to stay with people who could host stranded runners. The Guardian used Tableau to show how the offers of accommodation changed over time. The Guardian also created an interactive map to show the explosion locations from a birds-eye view.

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• Some their work was benign. The crowd-sourced investigation almost immediately   turned up a high-resolution photograph of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in the seconds   after the blast. The picture, taken on a iPhone by a runner who had just   completed the marathon, was of much better quality than anything released by   authorities. 

   

   Users of the website Reddit also quickly identified the distinctive black   Bridgestone Golf hat worn by Tamerlan Tsarnaev as he wove through the crowds   of happy marathon watchers.

• But the internet detectives also showed none of the reserve or caution of the   professionals. Tens of thousands of Twitter users crowded onto the Boston   Police Department scanner early on Friday morning as reports of a shoot-out   were emerging from Watertown. 

   

   They frantically tweeted everything coming over the crackly line, often   mishearing or failing to understand the context as police screamed for back   up. 

   

   Most damaging of all Twitter users began to circulate a rumour that a missing   Indian-American student was one of the bombers.

• The wildfire of speculation that the student was involved was only brought   under control after NBC News directly contradicted the internet reports. 

   

   "The crowdsourcing part of wanted posters is about making sure as many   people as possible see the picture. It is emphatically not about making sure   any allegations resulting from the picture are made public," said the   New Statesman's Alex Hern.  

   

   "That's not crowdsourcing, it's just speculating; there is little   advantage in getting the crowd involved at that point, and the major   downside that someone's life might be ruined based on who they look like." 

   

   This opinion was shared by Alexis C Madrigal, senior editor at The Atlantic   who criticised Redditors' actions as a "dangerous experiment".  

   

   He said: "They are well-meaning people who have not considered the moral   weight of what they're doing.  

   

   "This is vigilantism, and it's only the illusion that what we do online   is not as significant as what we do offline that allows this to go on.   Imagine if people were standing around in Boston pointing fingers at people   in photographs and (roughly) accusing them of terrorism.  

   

   "Even if Reddit had gotten the right guy, I would have still thought this   was a dangerous experiment that should not be repeated.  

   

   "My hope is that we sober up about when and how crowdsourcing should be   applied in the investigation of criminal cases. And perhaps, in the future,   people will find ways to crowdsource without spotlighting false positives in   a public discussion forum."

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• Minutes after the world first saw the suspects’ photos, a user on Reddit, the online community that is also one of the largest Web sites in the world, posted side-by-side pictures comparing Sunil’s facial features with the face that would later be identified as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The pictures were accompanied by speculation about the circumstances surrounding Sunil’s disappearance and the F.B.I.’s involvement in his search. By 8 p.m., three hours after the F.B.I. released the suspects’ photos, angry messages began to appear on the Tripathi’s Facebook page,

• Alternative news outlet Infowars.com publishes numerous photos of the Boston bombing scene appearing on the 4chan.org website that show numerous images of questionable individuals donning large backpacks at the scene of the Boston Marathon bombings. Three of the male figures look to be Arab or Middle Eastern in appearance, while another two of the individuals are white. The images show the persons looking away from the marathon runners, speaking on cellphones and absconding from the scene immediately after the blast. Paul Joseph Watson, “Potential Boston Bombing Culprits and Person of Interest Identified?” Infowars.com, April 17, 2013.

• By April 19th, about 9,000 cops, SWAT teams and National Guardsmen had descended on Boston to find the remaining suspect in the marathon bombing. In the Watertown neighborhood, they went door to door, in some cases forcing innocent people out of their homes at gunpoint. In at least one instance documented in a photo posted online, they pointed their guns at someone for merely looking out of a window while standing in his own home. And all of this was an effort to find Dhokar Tsarnaev, a single 19-year-old man who was unarmed when he was finally apprehended.

    

  Tsarnaev wasn't found during one of those door-to-door searches, or even during the "stay-in" order. Rather, he was found after the order was lifted and after a homeowner noticed something suspicious in his own yard and called the police to investigate. For all the extraordinary measures taken in Boston that week, the crisis was resolved after a fairly ordinary series of events.

    

  There isn't much of the Second Amendment left in Massachusetts, and the actions of local, state and federal authorities almost certainly violated the spirit and sentiment of the Third. In entering homes without permission, they essentially suspended the Fourth. But they did find their man. And he was arrested without any further loss of life.
• Police actions like those in Boston also tend to have a self-reinforcing effect on public opinion. A heavy police presence to many implies a serious threat, whether or not such a threat actually exists. That tends to sow fear, which in turn makes the public grateful for the police presence. None of which speaks to the legitimacy of the police action itself. That Tsarnaev was arrested in Boston with no further loss of life is certainly a mark in favor of the police and public officials. But it says little about the legitimacy of the police actions leading up to his arrest. It tells us only that the local, state and federal governments used enough force to apprehend him. It doesn't speak to whether they used too much.

• In 1980 (not that long ago; Barack Obama was in college), IBM introduced its Model 3380 disk drive, the first device capable of storing more than a gigabyte of data. It was roughly the size and weight of a refrigerator and cost an inflation-adjusted $100,000. Today a flash drive costing one-thousandth as much can store 50 times the data and fit on a key ring. The amount of data that can be stored is nearly infinite. In a prescient series of blog posts several years ago, Princeton computer-science professor Edward Felten explained that this tremendous growth in storage capacity would inevitably spur intelligence agencies to collect all available data--everything--simply because it's cheaper and easier than trying to figure out what to take and what to ignore. "If storage is free but analysts' time is costly, then the cost-minimizing strategy is to record everything and sort it out later," Felten noted.

    

  That is precisely what has happened. And at the same time, ever more sophisticated computer algorithms make it possible to sift through and analyze larger and larger slices of that data, raising social and ethical dilemmas that cannot be ignored. The future is here. Nearly everything that happens from now on has the potential not just to be seen by some restless King David or overheard by an eavesdropping Polonius but also stored indefinitely. Government agencies, and the private corporations working with them, collect and store billions of records every day, and they're hungry for more: not just phone records and Web addresses but e-mails, texts, downloads, medical records, retail receipts, bank balances, credit-card numbers and travel itineraries.

• The world glimpsed a corner of this future in April, when two bombs went off at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. The scene was chaos. The bombers had vanished. Yet within a few hours, their faces were plainly visible on TV screens around the world. It turned out that every nefarious move they made as they delivered their deadly packages to Boylston Street had been scanned and stored by surveillance cameras. Their quick capture was a triumph for law enforcement but left an unsettling realization in its wake: everyone else on those teeming Boston sidewalks was also being watched and remembered.

    

  Then, just weeks after Boston, the slight and pallid Snowden emerged from his NSA cubicle to warn us that surveillance goes far beyond the tireless eyes of the cameras. Every phone call placed, every Web page visited--billions and trillions of data points, like raindrops in a monsoon--is captured daily and stored for possible analysis by the U.S. government. Remember the time you pocket-dialed your sister? The time you Googled your college flame? The day you did that thing you so deeply regret--that thing you thought was private--involving a Web search or a phone call or a text or an e-mail? It's all there. In fact, the government, with the NSA as the lead agency, is this moment busy building the world's largest data-storage facility in Utah. More than a million square feet, room enough to preserve everything, for the time being.

• (CBS News) During the hunt for the Boston bomb suspects, authorities struggled to maintain control over pace of developing information and media reporting. The Boston search was both helped and hindered by the involvement of mainstream media and the public by way of social media but CBS News' John Miller reports that Boston police and FBI investigators could not sort fact from fiction among themselves in some cases.

• Former Boston Police Commissioner Bill Bratton emphasized the importance of information sourcing while sifting through reports in what he calls "the fog of war."

  "The most useful question is where did this come from, what is the source?" Bratton said, emphasizing that in fast-moving situations, "you're making life and death decisions based on that information."

• New York Times media columnist Brian Stelter told "CBS This Morning" that misreporting in the wake of the Boston bomb attack was "heightened by the web, heightened by social media" and involved "a lot of social media users retweeting the police scanner, which is some cases was misinformation to begin with."

  "[It's] amateur sleuthing," Stelter said of so-called social media manhunt. "It came from a good place. People wanted to help but they didn't know how to help."

  Miller added that authorities are often forced to publicize details they know will change down the line.

  "They don't have a choice anymore ... the media isn't going to wait. ... The officials have to be the source... if they don't become the source, then everyone else does and they know even less."

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• Old-fashioned manhunts like the one that gripped the Boston area last week could soon be replaced by targeted crowdsourced sleuthing, says Hal Hodson  

  IT WAS an unprecedented display of vigilantism. After the bombings at the Boston marathon last week, thousands of would-be sleuths flocked to the internet. They scoured pictures and video and posted images of suspicious characters with backpacks, who seemed to fit official descriptions of the most wanted.

    

  But they failed badly: members of the social media site Reddit falsely accused a missing college student, Sunil Tripathi, of the crimes. Law enforcement agencies got the real suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, in a very old-fashioned way. An all-out manhunt ended on 19 April when a resident in Watertown, Massachusetts, discovered Tsarnaev hiding in a boat.

• A big problem with theories floated on social media is that information can go viral simply because it is popular, whether or not it is true. Patrick Meier of the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) in Doha is building Verily, a system that allows users to submit verification requests for information they are interested in. Each request prompts a crowd of online workers to set off into their networks to figure it out. The system gathers evidence for and against the claim, though it won't pass judgement.

    

  Meier says Verily could help to tame Reddit. "There was a lot of controversy over Reddit," he says. "What Verily could do is channel the goodwill from this amazing community, and direct it into a systematic process of information collection and analysis."

    

  By training machine learning algorithms on huge data sets, Meier is building up profiles of the classes of digital evidence that tend to be credible, and those that are not.

• A team of dig­ital human­i­ties researchers at North­eastern is leading the devel­op­ment of a com­pre­hen­sive dig­ital archive fea­turing sto­ries, photos, videos, oral his­to­ries, social media, and other mate­rials related to last month’s tragic Boston Marathon bomb­ings.
• Our Marathon is project run through Northeastern’s NULab for Texts, Maps, and Net­works—the university’s research-​​based center for Dig­ital Human­i­ties and Com­pu­ta­tional Social Sci­ence. The archive will serve as a long-​​term memo­rial that pre­serves these records for stu­dents and researchers, pro­vides an impor­tant resource for future his­to­rians, and cre­ates an envi­ron­ment for the public to share its experiences.
• In related news, NULab co-​​director David Lazer has been ana­lyzing the texts and tweets sent out fol­lowing the bomb­ings to fur­ther under­stand how people use their social net­works during emer­gen­cies. This data, which he said he could be used to improve emer­gency response, will also included in the dig­ital archive.

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• “The Boston bombing provided the opportunity for the government to turn what should have been a police investigation into a military-style occupation of an American city,” Paul writes. “This unprecedented move should frighten us as much or more than the attack itself.”
• Paul argues that the Boston case sets a dangerous precedent, recounting scenes of “paramilitary police riding in tanks and pointing automatic weapons at innocent citizens.”

• “The suspect was not discovered by the paramilitary troops terrorizing the public,” Paul writes. “He was discovered by a private citizen, who then placed a call to the police. And he was identified not by government surveillance cameras, but by private citizens who willingly shared their photographs with the police.”

   

  “What has been sadly forgotten in all the celebration of the capture of one suspect and the killing of his older brother is that the police state tactics in Boston did absolutely nothing to catch them,” Paul added. “While the media crowed that the apprehension of the suspects was a triumph of the new surveillance state – and, predictably, many talking heads and Members of Congress called for even more government cameras pointed at the rest of us – the fact is none of this caught the suspect. Actually, it very nearly gave the suspect a chance to make a getaway.”

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