{"id":1645,"date":"2013-04-24T12:23:28","date_gmt":"2013-04-24T12:23:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/?p=1645"},"modified":"2013-04-24T12:23:28","modified_gmt":"2013-04-24T12:23:28","slug":"reddit-and-the-marathon-bombers-the-wise-way-to-crowdsource-a-manhunt-the-new-yorker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/2013\/04\/24\/reddit-and-the-marathon-bombers-the-wise-way-to-crowdsource-a-manhunt-the-new-yorker\/","title":{"rendered":"Reddit and the Marathon Bombers: The Wise Way to Crowdsource a Manhunt : The New Yorker"},"content":{"rendered":"

After Reddit\u2019s attempt to find the Boston Marathon bombers turned into a major failure (for which Reddit\u2019s general manager Erik Martin\u00a0publicly apologized Monday<\/a>), the over-all conclusion seems to be that the whole experiment was misguided from the start, and that the Redditors\u2019 inability to identify the Tsarnaev brothers demonstrates the futility of using an online crowd of amateur sleuths to help with a criminal investigation. Or, as theTimes<\/i>\u2019s<\/i>\u00a0Nick Bilton\u00a0put it<\/a>, \u201cIt looks as if the theory of the \u2018wisdom of crowds\u2019 doesn\u2019t apply to terrorist manhunts.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

That proposition may be true. But Reddit\u2019s failure isn\u2019t evidence for it. To begin with, it\u2019s a bit facile to frame this story as a competition between \u201cthe crowd\u201d and \u201cthe experts,\u201d since the official investigation wasn\u2019t relying on a couple of experts, but rather had its own crowd at work, one made up, in Bilton\u2019s words, of \u201cthousands of local and federal officials.\u201d More important is that the Redditors faced a simple, but insuperable, obstacle when it came to identifying the Tsarnaevs, namely that the two brothers were not, as far as I can tell, in any of the photographs that were widely available before Thursday morning. The footage that convinced investigators that the Tsarnaevs were prime suspects was the footage from the Lord & Taylor surveillance cameras, which hadn\u2019t (and still hasn\u2019t) been released to the public. This is an obvious point, but one that\u2019s been overlooked: Reddit had no real chance of identifying the right suspects because it didn\u2019t have access to the information that mattered. (Had\u00a0the clip<\/a>\u00a0of the Tsarnaevs walking down Boylston Street been publicly available last Tuesday, I don\u2019t think there\u2019s any doubt Redditors would have flagged them as suspicious.) Whatever the value of the wisdom of crowds, it isn\u2019t\u00a0magic:<\/i>you can\u2019t ask the crowd to find someone that, in a sense, it\u2019s never seen.<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Reddit and the Marathon Bombers: The Wise Way to Crowdsource a Manhunt : The New Yorker<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After Reddit\u2019s attempt to find the Boston Marathon bombers turned into a major failure (for which Reddit\u2019s general manager Erik Martin\u00a0publicly apologized Monday), the over-all conclusion seems to be that the whole experiment was misguided from the start, and that the Redditors\u2019 inability to identify the Tsarnaev brothers demonstrates the futility of using an online […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3pfIY-qx","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1645"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1645\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}