Techno's Tales: Detective Reddit

[Techno]

Warning: Please do not go harass any person, website, or company mentioned in this tale. All intentions are for education and entertainment.

 

On April 15th, 2013, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev planted two homemade bombs, which would soon detonate, killing three people, this would become the event known as the Boston Marathon Bombing. During that time, there was a manhunt for the attackers, the only problem was, they didn’t know who did it.

This was a driving factor for Reddit user OPS777, who as the hero he was, started the channel /r/findbostonbombers for the sole purpose of finding and putting a stop to the criminals. One of the rules of the channel was not to name anyone. However, due to the incompetence of the moderators there, someone was able to post a name: Sunil Tripathi.

Sunil was missing, he had been missing for six months before the bombings. So Reddit, with their everlasting wisdom, began to spread this as fact. Soon all of Reddit would know Sunil Tripathi.

“We did it” roared the masses, and as the hivemind they were, went straight to the Facebook group, created to try and find Sunil, and began to harass it. Even worse, they called up his parents, and would also harass them.

The family decided to close down the group. Sunil would soon be found, on the side of a road, turns out, he had been dead before the Boston Bombing. Soon the real terrorists would get caught and arrested. And OPS777 would now become known, as I call him, the detective of Reddit.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Sunil_Tripathi

https://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-falsely-accuses-sunil-tripathi-of-boston-bombing-2013-7

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Marathon_bombing

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/04/reddit-find-boston-bombers-founder-interview/315987/

Edited December 16, 2021 by Techno
's needed to be added

[Reality vs Adventure]

This kind of mix up could be dangerous to an accused suspect from social media as well to their families because we know there are a lot of people that would take matters into their own hands and falsely make citizen’s arrest as we saw with the Ahmaud Arbery case. Then again social media helped identify many of the Jan 6 capital attackers and track them down. So we need these tools to help law enforcement, but at the same time these situations of terrorist attacks will bring anger in people and they will do vigilante justice even to the wrongly accused. And it gets especially problematic when accusing an ethnic minority that is already victimized as it is. But at least they helped find his body. It takes a terrorist attack to get any attention to missing persons of color, and many missing Native Americans go without any conclusion or media attention but the media was all over it when Gabby Petito went missing which is called the ‘missing white woman syndrome.’ I’m just making a point and not meaning to get into any political discussion. But it’s a point nonetheless that needs mentioning.

[The Blackangel]

Social media sites have been the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to incidents like these. Some people can use face recognition software and correctly identify people involved. Others can say something like "Hey, that's my cousin!". But then others just say they think they know that person. The worst say that a person is definitely the criminal without knowing anything about them or their activities before, during, and after the incident. So social media can help, but often doesn't help, but in fact makes the situation worse. Especially for the one they're accusing.