r/findbostonbombers

We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory
by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin
Published 1 Oct 2018

An acquaintance noted: “Blue Tracksuit Guy Identified…ends up being a local kid,” Reddit, April 18, 2013, accessed through Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20130420030905/http://www.reddit.com/r/findbostonbombers/comments/1cl3cj/blue_tracksuit_guy_identifiedends_up_being_a/. “Bag men: Feds seek these two”: Larry Celona, “Authorities circulate photos of two men spotted carrying bags near site of Boston bombings,” New York Post, April 18, 2013. deeply fearful of appearing in public: “Blue Tracksuit Guy Identified,” Reddit. It included an email link: r/findbostonbombers subreddit, accessed through Internet Archive, http://web.archive.org/web/20130418155254/http://www.reddit.com/r/findbostonbombers/. “At one point I was banning”: “I was one of the moderators of r/findbostonbombers,” Reddit, February 24, 2014.

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Finally keep in mind that most or all of the “suspects” being discussed are, in all likelihood, innocent people and that they should be treated as innocent until they are proven guilty. The moderators also wrote, “r/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.” It included an email link to the Boston FBI and implored readers to send any major information about the identities of the bombers to the FBI or Boston Police Department. Within a day, r/findbostonbombers was an accessible source for tips, analysis, and speculation, and reporters, eager for any leads, any coverage related to Boston, flocked there.

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The 117th Boston Marathon a twenty-three-year-old professional poker player: John Herrman, “The Man Behind the Internet’s Hunt for the Boston Bomber,” BuzzFeed, April 17, 2013. created the subreddit r/findbostonbombers: Ibid. in 2012, one gearhead: “Car part left at hit and run scene, any idea what it belongs to? It’s a right front headlight,” Reddit, December 18, 2012. “Does anyone remember Richard Jewell?”: “Does anyone remember Richard Jewell?,” Reddit, April 17, 2013, accessed through Internet Archive, http://web.archive.org/web/20130419234150/http://www.reddit.com/r/findbostonbombers/comments/1civf6/does_anyone_remember_richard_jewell/. “basically every brown person wearing a backpack”: Adrian Chen, “Your Guide to the Boston Marathon Bombing Amateur Internet Crowd-Sleuthing,” Gawker, April 17, 2013.

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All
by Adrian Hon
Published 14 Sep 2022

But the tale is wrong: in reality, the community and the moderators quickly shut down the idea as being impractical, insensitive, and very dangerous. “Cloudmakers tried to solve 9/11” is a great story, but it’s completely false. Unfortunately, the same isn’t true for the poster child for online sleuthing gone wrong, the r/findbostonbombers Reddit community.39 In the immediate aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, the community was created as a way to spread news and exchange theories about the perpetrators. Initially, moderators and users acted responsibly by not publishing the personal information of “suspects” and leaving the sleuthing to law enforcement authorities.

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If this wasn’t reminiscent enough of the dystopian game show in the movie The Running Man, it soon emerged that they’d identified the wrong person—though not after whipping up a manhunt that, by their own account, involved 1.4 million people. There’s a parallel between the seemingly unmoderated theorists of r/findbostonbombers and the Citizen app and those in QAnon: none feel any responsibility for spreading unsupported speculation as fact. What they do feel is that anything should be solvable, as Laura Hall, immersive environment and narrative designer, describes: “There’s a general sense of, ‘This should be solveable/findable/etc’ that you see in lots of reddit communities for unsolved mysteries and so on.

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The editor of the Telegraph, Chris Evans, said the story was a “complete misrepresentation,” but regardless, the plan would only be the same practice laid down by Gawker Media in 2008, which directly tied its writers’ pay to pageviews.85 The chase for pageviews can have consequences beyond encouraging clickbait journalism. Writing about the r/findbostonbombers debacle in 2013, Jay Caspian Kang wondered why so many journalists from different backgrounds felt the need to tweet unconfirmed information about the identity of the bombers. He concluded, “It helps to envision modern journalism as a kind of video game. If you’re part of the Internet media, everything you put out into the world comes with its own scoring system.

Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness
by Simone Browne
Published 1 Oct 2015

On April 22, 2013, Reddit general manager Erik Martin released an apology for the site’s role in what he termed the “online witch hunts and dangerous speculation” that occurred during the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing where users of the site (“Redditors”) incorrectly identified suspects using the /r/findbostonbombers subreddit page, a dedicated Google Doc, photographs uploaded to Flikr, and other crowdsourced information. See “Reflections on the Recent Boston Crisis,” Blog. Reddit, April 22, 2013, accessed February 1, 2015, http://www.redditblog.com/2013/04/reflections-on-recent-boston-crisis.html. 52. Lyon, The Electronic Eye, 48. 53.