Paper:
Madrigal, A. C. (2013, April 19). #BostonBombing: The Anatomy of a Misinformation Disaster. The Atlantic. Retrieved from http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/04/-bostonbombing-the-anatomy-of-a-misinformation-disaster/275155/
Discussion leader: Kurt Luther
Summary:
This news article in The Atlantic seeks to better understand how two innocent people were widely circulated in social media as being suspects in the Boston Marathon Bombing. When the bombing took place, law enforcement took several days to identify the correct suspects. Meanwhile, online communities in Reddit, Twitter, 4chan, and elsewhere attempted to follow the investigation and even contribute to it. Ultimately, two entirely different people were named as the correct suspects.
The author primarily uses Twitter archives, audio recordings of police scanners, searches of the relevant Reddit forum, some informal interviews, and knowledge of the broader context surrounding the event, as the data sources for the article. The author traces one suspect, Mulugeta, to a name mentioned by law enforcement on a police scanner. This was incorrectly transcribed as “Mike Mulugeta” (“Mike” was just a spelling aid) by an amateur tweet that the author tracked down. The author tracks down the origin of the other suspect, Sunil Tripathi, to a tweet posted by another amateur, Greg Hughes. Hughes claimed to have heard the name on a police scanner, but no evidence of that has been found in any police scanner recordings that day. Despite this, many sleuths the author interviewed claimed to have heard it.
According to the author, Hughes’ tweet, which mentioned both suspects, appeared to be the source of an information cascade that led to these suspects’ names being widely reported. One key factor seems to have been several members of the news media, such as a CBS cameraman and a Buzzfeed reporter, that quickly retweeted the original tweet. This led to more mainstream media broadcasting as well as Anonymous further spreading the misinformation.
Only the identification of a different set of suspects (the correct ones) by NBC reporter Brian Williams led to an end of the propagation of misinformation. The author concludes by pondering how the Sunil Tripathi name entered the conversation, since there is no evidence of it mentioned by officials on police scanners or elsewhere. The author speculates Hughes could be mistaken or the scanner recordings could be incomplete. The author concludes by noting that many different parties, including amateurs and professionals, were partly responsible for the mistake.
Reflections:
This article does a nice job of digging deeper into a key question surrounding the failure of online sleuthing in the Boston Marathon Bombing. That question is, how did two innocent people get named as suspects in this attack?
Ultimately, the author is only able to get a partial answer to that question. One name was indeed mentioned by police, though misheard and transcribed incorrectly, and ultimately that person wasn’t involved. The author is able to track down both the recording of the police scanner and the tweet showing the incorrect transcription.
The other name is harder to explain. The author tracks down a tweet that he believes is responsible for promulgating the false information, and does a convincing job of showing that it originated the claims that eventually made it to the mainstream news. However, it’s still not clear where the author of that tweet got his misinformation, if it was a mistake (good faith or not), or we’re still missing key evidence. The author acknowledges this is frustrating, and I agree.
This article is effective in illustrating some of the strengths and limitations of tracing the path of crowdsourced investigations. Sometimes the information is readily available online, by searching Twitter archives or digging up recordings of police scanners. Sometimes the researcher has to dig deeper, interviewing potential sources (some of whom don’t respond), browsing forum threads, and scrubbing through long audio recordings. Sometimes the data simply is not available, or may never have existed.
As a journalist, the author has a different methodological approach than an academic researcher, and perhaps more flexibility to try a lot of different techniques and see what sticks. I think it’s interesting to think about whether an academic’s more systematic, but maybe constrained, methods might lead to different answers. I think the question the author originally poses is important and deserves an answer, if it’s possible with the surviving data.
Related to this, a minor methodological question I had was how the author could be sure he identified the very first tweets to contain the misinformation. I haven’t done large scale data analysis of Twitter, but my understanding is the amount of data researchers have access to has changed over time. In order to definitively say which tweets were earliest, the researcher would need to have access to all the tweets from that time period. I wonder if this was, or still is, possible.
Questions:
- How could we prevent the spread of misinformation as described here from happening in the future?
- What do you think is a bigger problem — incorrect analysis by amateurs, or amplifying of false information by professionals?
- The author notes that some people apologized for blaming innocent people, and others deleted their tweets. What is an appropriate response from responsible parties when amateur sleuthing goes wrong?
- Suspects in official investigations are often found to be innocent, with few repercussions. Why do you think this crowdsourced investigation led to much more outrage?
- The mystery of where Tripathi’s name came from remains unsolved. What other approaches could we try to solve it?
