These reports of what went on are almost as confused as speculation about what happened in the bombing.
I watched this going on all day yesterday. Certainly, there were many counterarguments and so on, but frankly the Reddit thread was a confused mess, with the same stuff getting posted over and over again, no coherent plan on organizing files by resolution or time, and no schema for IDing people, leading to multiple subthreads like 'I think this guy looks super-fishy' 'Which guy there's 100 people in that photo, who do you mean?' 'In the middle, on the left, once you've seen him you can't un-see him.' I don't think the Reddit community or subreddit moderators were at fault, but their search were nowhere near as well organized as you suggest.
What happened in the case of the runner kids is that another forum, AR15.com (dedicated to gun enthusiasts, as you might guess) pretty much decided that these two guys were guilty (based largely on the early photo speculations showing backpacks looking large enough to hold a pressure cooker). then one of the members decided to post on the Facebook page of the teenager in the blue tracksuit, which was then noticed by a Reddit user who was also watching the AR15.com thread (not me).
The teen saw the post on his Facebook page, stated that he had nothing to do with it and immediately contacted law enforcement; At this point the subReddit moderator went through and cleaned up the old threads and so forth. IIRC the 'non-suspect' went to a court building or a police station (wherever the investigation HQ is) straight away, and later returned to post an update on his FB page. The ar15.com folks meanwhile ostracized the person who had posted the link on the FB page and convinced themselves that they're all targets now (that community is heavily invested in the idea that it should be Muslim terrorists, presumably because they're feeling sensitive over the gun control issue).
I don't mean this as a criticism of the Reddit folks, who were doing their best. I'm posting this more to observe that social media in general does not do that great of job at this kind of thing. EDIT: I think social media and crowds can do a great job of that, but it needs pretty strict.active moderation and a gameplan at the outset. That proceduralism slows down people who want to dive right in and help straight away, but it also helps to eliminate false positives.
Hey Reddit isn't going to sort everything for the FBI and give them names of suspects to arrest. That's the job of the FBI.
All we are saying is that Reddit, 4chan and others may help the FBI if they care to watch these threads. That might or might not be helpful but it can't hurt as long as the FBI isn't willingly looking away, which might then trigger the vigilante action.
I watched this going on all day yesterday. Certainly, there were many counterarguments and so on, but frankly the Reddit thread was a confused mess, with the same stuff getting posted over and over again, no coherent plan on organizing files by resolution or time, and no schema for IDing people, leading to multiple subthreads like 'I think this guy looks super-fishy' 'Which guy there's 100 people in that photo, who do you mean?' 'In the middle, on the left, once you've seen him you can't un-see him.' I don't think the Reddit community or subreddit moderators were at fault, but their search were nowhere near as well organized as you suggest.
What happened in the case of the runner kids is that another forum, AR15.com (dedicated to gun enthusiasts, as you might guess) pretty much decided that these two guys were guilty (based largely on the early photo speculations showing backpacks looking large enough to hold a pressure cooker). then one of the members decided to post on the Facebook page of the teenager in the blue tracksuit, which was then noticed by a Reddit user who was also watching the AR15.com thread (not me).
The teen saw the post on his Facebook page, stated that he had nothing to do with it and immediately contacted law enforcement; At this point the subReddit moderator went through and cleaned up the old threads and so forth. IIRC the 'non-suspect' went to a court building or a police station (wherever the investigation HQ is) straight away, and later returned to post an update on his FB page. The ar15.com folks meanwhile ostracized the person who had posted the link on the FB page and convinced themselves that they're all targets now (that community is heavily invested in the idea that it should be Muslim terrorists, presumably because they're feeling sensitive over the gun control issue).
I don't mean this as a criticism of the Reddit folks, who were doing their best. I'm posting this more to observe that social media in general does not do that great of job at this kind of thing. EDIT: I think social media and crowds can do a great job of that, but it needs pretty strict.active moderation and a gameplan at the outset. That proceduralism slows down people who want to dive right in and help straight away, but it also helps to eliminate false positives.