The body of Brown University student Sunil Tripathi has been confirmed found in the water near Indian Point Park in Providence, Rhode Island. While this might provide closure for Tripathi’s family, who have searched for him since mid-March, it’s also a potent reminder of how wrong Reddit users were when they falsely accused him of being partially responsible for the Boston bombings. Tripathi’s parents were forced to suspend a Facebook page created to aid in the effort to locate him after they were deluged with comments from individuals who believed the incorrect online claims. To the site’s credit, Reddit did issue public and private apologies to the Tripathi family. However, the “Findthebostombombers” message thread started on Reddit spread to other social media powerhouses, including Twitter, who at least indirectly shared in compounding the problem (and who have not issued any apologies at this time).
Techcitement discussed the potential ramifications of crowdsourcing criminal investigations in “Facebooking For Great Justice” back in 2011 (and one of our writers, Ben Masten, touched on his personal experience with the phenomenon last week). Since then, we’ve witnessed evidence for and against the wisdom of asking the masses for advice or suggestions. In most cases where crowdsourcing doesn’t go as planned, it’s related to marketers getting more than they bargained for when attempting to leverage social media for marketing purposes. Take Mountain Dew’s 2012 online ad campaign, for example. “Dub the Dew” encouraged people to suggest names for a green apple flavored version of its soda and to vote for the top 10 picks to display on an online leaderboard. The company quickly pulled the effort when winning names included “Diabeetus”, “Gushing Granny”, “Fapulous Apple”, and in the top spot, “Hitler did nothing wrong”.
Positive examples of crowdsourcing include Kickstarter, where new ideas constantly come to life when enough viewers deem them worth paying for, and 99designs, a website that allows you to request a custom logo or design by way of a contest, with a promise to pay the author of the winning illustration a specified prize amount.
It’s one thing to attempt to harness the power of crowdsourcing for the purpose of advertising or to solicit a group effort to perform a task, but it’s quite another to place value on crowdsourced detective work towards a criminal investigation.
In fact, it’s often unclear if the motivation behind crowdsourced detective work is an interest in aiding criminal investigations or whether it’s simply an attempt to dole out justice via public humiliation. Public shaming has a long history in our society, but traditionally it was limited in scope. A store or a small town might post the names of those who recently wrote bad checks, or in grade-school, a student might have to write a promise not to repeat a misdeed numerous times on a chalkboard. With today’s internet, the effects of public humiliation are much more powerful. Effectively, the targeted individuals suffer a life sentence before ever getting the opportunity for a fair trial. Today’s employers consult the likes of Google or Facebook as first stops when doing employee background checks, and information placed online winds up duplicated and archived, ensuring it never really disappears.
Perhaps the lesson is that when it comes to criminal matters, “wisdom of the crowd” should be reserved for the jury during a trial, not sourced from social media web sites.
They almost called Code Red “Stalin’s Jizzem”