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Misinformation Cascading Towards Tragedy: Harmful Accusations in the Wake of the Boston Bombing

After the Boston Marathon came to a gruesome end, tensions soared. Swaths of Americans from all across the country called for the perpetrators of the attack to receive swift justice. Unfortunately, this fiery agitation led to one of the most prominent misinformed witch-hunts of the decade.

An article published in The Atlantic last year discusses the aftermath of the bombing. Soon after the event, speculation began on Twitter and Reddit that missing Brown student Sunil Tripathi was involved in the bombing, due to similarities in his appearance to a figure spotted in the marathon surveillance feeds. A subsection of Reddit dedicated to solving this crime forwarded Tripathi as a primary suspect. Thousands of followers on social media followed these voices with fervor, posting comments in support of the claims. On a police scanner message, the name Mulugeta was spelled; this led to people additionally spreading the idea that a man named Mike Mulugeta was a second suspect in the crime.

Of course, today we know that these two men had nothing to do with the crime. The actual perpetrators were caught, and apologies were delivered to the families of the falsely accused. But these claims caused irreversible emotional damage. What caused this miscarriage of justice?

The information cascade model taught in Networks provides insight. As information traverses between people, crowd opinion starts to outweigh individual knowledge. In this particular case, the first voices, the voices that were sure they had found the correct suspects based on their own (rather nebulous) research, were trusted. People believed in these results and voiced their own support. As more and more people joined the cacophony, a very clear majority formed among those individuals with the loudest voices on the matter. To maintain a reasonable probability of correctness given their observations of these voices, individuals continued to join the bandwagon without regard to personal research and opinion formation.

From an information cascade perspective, dissenters need to be more vocal right from the beginning of the cascade to prevent this kind of witch-hunt. With multiple opinions represented, majorities are less clear, and individuals would have compelling reason to pay heed to their own opinions and research.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/04/-bostonbombing-the-anatomy-of-a-misinformation-disaster/275155/

 

 

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