Reddit joins ‘sorry’ chorus on wrong Boston bombing reports

The general manager of San Francisco-based news-sharing platform Reddit issued a public apology on April 22 for being a rallying point for amateur sleuths who used it to inadvertently expose the wrong people behind the bombing at the Boston Marathon. “Though started with noble intentions, some of the activity on Reddit fueled online witch hunts and dangerous speculation which spiraled into very negative consequences for innocent parties,” Erik Martin said in a blog post. Reddit along with some of its users and moderators apologized privately to the family of a missing college student wrongly implicated during a quest to use crowd-sourcing to identify who was behind the bombing. Reddit traffic hit a peak of about 272,000 users when reports hit that a second suspect was captured.

Several news organizations that also erred in reporting have owned up to their mistake.


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