Dean Ford's List: Boston Marathon Bombing

• “The quality of habits, actions, and consumption patterns that impact the ecology of digital content and communities.”

• Boston Marathon bombing of 2013, terrorist attack that took place a short distance from the finish line of the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013. A pair of homemade bombs detonated in the crowd watching the race, killing 3 people and injuring more than 260.

• According to myriad reports, spectators and runners passed cell phones around to let loved ones know they were okay, whether via text or Twitter. And many, many pictures were snapped, posted, viewed and forwarded around.
• “While Twitter offered the fastest, most up-to-date, and accurate information, it also served as an unfiltered chronicle of the most distressing imagery, which can have lasting mental and physical effects,” Rebecca Greenfield wrote on the Atlantic Wire. Greenfield goes on to evoke the term media-induced PTSD.

• As government investigators in Boston and around the country have been working to follow the winding stream of forensic data and digital imagery toward the terrorist behind the Boston Marathon bombing, a parallel investigation has been happening, completely in the open, on the Internet.
• a horde of amateur digital forensic analysts have been poring over every pixel of some of the same raw material as investigators—publicly available high-resolution photos and video of the race, bombing, and aftermath, which has been scattered across the Web and broadcast by news media—hoping to see something that official investigators have not.

• The FBI has not publicly confirmed this photo as Suspect 2, but Green told the Huffington Post that an agent told him, "this is probably the best we have right now." The Associated Press has also authenticated the photo.

• Police quickly descended around the finish line and, with cell phones mostly not working, Bozorg and her boyfriend repaired to his home, turned on the news, and logged onto Facebook, where Bozorg posted that she was OK and that her phone was down.
• "I have been following my friend's Facebook [account] who is near the scene and she is updating everyone before it even gets to the news,"
• Indeed, as word spread of the blasts on Monday afternoon, social media seemed shaped by every aspect of the response, from runners giving their accounts of the race-turned-nightmare on Facebook, to authorities using Twitter to give instant updates,
• On Monday afternoon, #BostonMarathon quickly became a trending hashtag on Twitter.
• Terrorism experts said the proliferation of photos and video on the Web through social media might also help authorities identify the perpetrators of the attack.

3 more annotations...

• As the Boston marathon wound down on the Monday afternoon, a Twitter user with the handle @DeLoBarstool posted a brief tweet: "Uhh explosions in Boston" – the first online record that can be found of the two bombs that went off near the race's finish line, killing three people, injuring 170 more and sparking a dramatic city-wide manhunt watched around the world.
• While some users of Reddit – the social media community owned by Condé Nast's holding firm, Advance – used the site to offer support, exchange information and speculate in the days after the deadly explosions, others conducted what Wired magazine described as a "witchhunt" – for which one of the site's founders apologised last night.

• Immediately following the Boston Marathon attacks, individuals near the scene posted a deluge of data to social media sites. Previous work has shown that these data can be leveraged to provide rapid insight during natural disasters, disease outbreaks and ongoing conflicts that can assist in the public health and medical response. Here, we examine and discuss the social media messages posted immediately after and around the Boston Marathon bombings, and find that specific keywords appear frequently prior to official public safety and news media reports. Individuals immediately adjacent to the explosions posted messages within minutes via Twitter which identify the location and specifics of events, demonstrating a role for social media in the early recognition and characterization of emergency events.

• What Green didn't know, and what the world was soon going to find out, was that Green's picture eventually became the clearest image of 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, aka Suspect #2. In the high-resolution image, you can see Tsarnaev calmly walk away from the explosion in his unmistakable white baseball cap. On top of that, the smartphone pic captured Tsarnaev without the backpack he was spotted carrying earlier on surveillance cameras. The backpack that reportedly held the bomb.

• That’s the clearest lesson you can draw about the media from the last week, when both old- and new-media outlets fell down on the job. By now you’ve likely heard the lowlights. CNN and the AP incorrectly reported on Wednesday that a Boston Marathon suspect had been arrested.
• People on Reddit and editors at the New York Post wrongly fingered innocent kids as bombing suspects. Redditors also pushed the theory that a Brown University student who has been missing for more than a month was one of the bombers—a story that gained steam on Twitter Thursday when people listening to police scanners heard the cops repeat the student’s name.

• On Wednesday afternoon, CNN and several other news outlets incorrectly reported that officials had arrested a suspect in connection with the Boston Marathon bombings. CNN described the alleged perpetrator only as a “dark skinned individual,” and host Wolf Blitzer also pushed reporter John King to say whether the suspect had an accent.

   

  Less than an hour later, CBS tweeted, “JUST IN: Man sought as possible suspect is WHITE MALE, wearing white baseball cap on backwards, gray hoodie and black jacket.”

   

  In repose to one or perhaps both of the reports, the FBI released a scathing statement cautioning journalists not to jump to conclusions:

   

  Contrary to widespread reporting, no arrest has been made in connection with the Boston Marathon attack. Over the past day and a half, there have been a number of press reports based on information from unofficial sources that has been inaccurate. Since these stories often have unintended consequences, we ask the media, particularly at this early stage of the investigation, to exercise caution and attempt to verify information through appropriate official channels before reporting.

• In the middle of the last night's nearly unbelievable turn of events, for a few hours, hundreds of thousands of people received a message about the identity of the alleged Boston Marathon bombers that was painfully false. Word got out that the Boston Police Department scanner had declared the names of the two suspects.

    

  But the names that went out over first social networks and then news blogs and websites were not Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, which the Federal Bureau of Investigation released early this morning. Instead, two other people wholly unconnected to the case became, for a while, two of America's most notorious alleged criminals.

• A body pulled from the water off India Point Park in Rhode Island has been identified as the Brown University student mistakenly linked by amateur sleuths on a social media site to the Boston bombings.

  The body of 22-year-old Sunil Tripathi was identified through dental records, Health Department spokeswoman Dara Chadwick said Thursday.

• After the April 15 bombings of the Boston Marathon, crowdsourcing groups drawing upon photos released by the FBI of a suspect erroneously reported via Reddit, a social news website, that the person in a baseball cap strongly resembled the missing student.
• At one point, Tripathi's name landed on the Twitter top trends list.

1 more annotation...