r/findbostonbombers

We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory

by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin  · 1 Oct 2018

with threads. Just after midnight, a twenty-three-year-old professional poker player from England, who went by the username oops777, created the subreddit r/findbostonbombers to be “one single place for people to compile, analyze, and discuss images, links, and thoughts about the Boston Bombing.” The Boston Marathon bombing case

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pondered with wide-eyed wonder that “Reddit Thinks It Can Solve the Boston Bombings.” Others were skeptical. Just five hours after it was engendered, r/findbostonbombers carried a post by u/rroach that read, “Does anyone remember Richard Jewell?,” referring to the Atlanta security guard erroneously identified as a suspect in

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in public. Reddit users criticized the coverage—but then again, Reddit itself had initially proposed these two as suspects. The moderators of the subreddit r/findbostonbombers, by this point, seemed to have a sturdy grasp of what could go wrong. The forum’s rules were extensive: We do not condone vigilante

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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

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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. Moderating the section

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divert attention and create undue work for vital law enforcement. The Washington Post later clarified that DesLauriers was indeed speaking about Reddit. Moderators of r/findbostonbombers immediately banned photos that did not include the suspects. Within three hours, though, two remarkable things happened on Reddit, one incredible, one despicable. The good

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-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

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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

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…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

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, 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

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/findbostonbombers,” Reddit, February 24, 2014. “Reddit users are hosting”: Ian Steadman, “Reddit users are hosting a witch-hunt for the Boston Marathon

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All

by Adrian Hon  · 14 Sep 2022  · 371pp  · 107,141 words

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

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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

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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

Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness

by Simone Browne  · 1 Oct 2015  · 326pp  · 84,180 words

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