Reddit issued a lengthy apology Monday for its role in fueling a social media "witch hunt" for suspects in last week's Boston bombings.
The social news website became a go-to source for updates on the Boston Marathon bombings. But it also became a place for amateur sleuths to gather and share their conspiracy theories and other ideas on who committed the crimes.
The relentless speculation and do-it-yourself CSI techniques ended up dragging in several innocent people, including Sunil Tripathi, a 22-year-old Brown University student who went missing last month.
After viewing the FBI's grainy photos of the suspects Thursday, some Redditors, as the users are called, became convinced that Tripathi was one of the bombers. Users gleefully pointed out the physical similarities between Tripathi and the second suspect, who ended up being 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
The growing wave of suspicion surrounding Tripathi led his family to release a statement the next day saying they knew "unequivocally" that he was not involved.
On Monday, Reddit General Manager Erik Martin posted an apology on the site, saying the crisis "showed the best and worst of Reddit's potential."
He said the company, as well as several Reddit users and moderators, had apologized privately to Tripathi's family and wanted "to take this opportunity to apologize publicly for the pain they have had to endure."
"We all need to look at what happened and make sure that in the future we do everything we can to help and not hinder crisis situations," the post said. "Some of the activity on Reddit fueled online witch hunts and dangerous speculation which spiraled into very negative consequences for innocent parties. The Reddit staff and the millions of people on Reddit around the world deeply regret that this happened."
Reddit consists entirely of user-generated content. Redditors can either vote a post up or down. The site's "front page" consists of its most popular posts. Reddit's thousands of threads on every sort of topic, called "subreddits," are moderated by volunteers. Last month, Reddit had nearly 64 million unique visitors from 174 countries who viewed 4.4 billion pages.
The San Francisco company said it enacted a policy a few years ago to not allow personal information on the site, a move designed to protect innocent people from being incorrectly identified and "disrupting or ruining their lives."
"We hoped that the crowdsourced search for new information would not spark exactly this type of witch hunt. We were wrong," Martin said. "The search for the bombers bore less resemblance to the types of vindictive Internet witch hunts our no-personal-information rule was originally written for, but the outcome was no different."
Last week's bombings were the first major terrorist attack on U.S. soil in the age of Facebook, Twitter and Reddit. But the watershed moment for social media quickly spiraled out of control as legions of Web sleuths cast suspicion on the innocent, shared bad tips and heightened the sense of panic and paranoia.
Boston police officials temporarily shut down online feeds of their police scanners and asked overeager Twitter users to limit what they posted on the microblogging site, saying that detailed tweets could compromise officers' positions and safety.
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©2013 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by MCT Information Services
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