The social media witch hunt. Unstoppable, relentless and addictive. Yet often based on speculation, misinformation and misplaced anger.
Online witch hunts, Internet bandwagons, trial by social media. Whatever you call them, they have one thing in common – they’re dangerous, and in the anonymous land of cyberspace, often innocent people get caught in the crosshairs.
They’re just as prevalent today as they have been over a decade ago, as angry and misguided Internet users fail to learn from past mistakes, still willing to spread unverified content across the Interweb and direct hateful – often violent – messages at others. And thus we have social media witch hunts gone wrong.
We list 3 examples of such, which nearly ruined the lives of the innocent people who they inadvertently ended up targeting.
In 1993 the UK saw one of its most horrific murders after two year old James Bulger was abducted from a shopping centre in Merseyside. More horrific still was the discovery that his killers were only children themselves.
The case caused uproar in the UK, which was reignited many years after the murder when the murderers – Jon Venables and Robert Thompson – now adults, were released from prison, secretly relocated and given new identities.
Social media went crazy. Despite a court order prohibiting people from releasing information attaining to the new identities of either Venables or Thompson, many social media users shared photos and information claiming to show the identities of the Bulger killers, despite the majority of these posts being completely unverified.
The potential dangers that face the people identified in the photos is obvious, and such actions are completely inexcusable, especially considering the people identified in the photos were innocent. Take David Calvert for instance, who had both his photo and location shared by social media users wishing to “hunt down” the Bulger killers. The social media rumours asserted he was in fact the adult Jon Venables.
David Calvert, source BBC.co.uk
As a result of the rumours, Calvert had to relocate multiple times and remains in constant fear of his life. A barrage of hate messages and death threats against Mr. Calvert surfaced on a Facebook group [now closed] that were responsible for sharing his photos, that managed many, many thousands of shares. Calvert said “I live in constant fear that someone will kill me and my family.”
Calvert isn’t the only person to have been wrongly identified as one of the Bulger killers, with several other photos of different men circulating the Internet, potentially causing serious danger to the people they show.
April 2013, at the finishing line of the Boston Marathon two explosives detonated, killing 3 and injuring hundreds more.
What ensued was perhaps on the biggest online crowd-sourced investigations ever, with thousands of users across a variety of platforms digging through the mountains of photos and videos being uploaded to the Internet, looking for clues as to the identities of the bombers.
The majority of these users were working and communicating through a thread on popular micro-blogging site Reddit, which had a dedicated thread (/findtheBostonBombers) on the subject. Such amateur investigations can potentially prove useful under the right circumstances. Images of one of the bombers walking away from the scene of the crime were discovered by online sleuths and things looks promising.
But then things spiralled out of control. Less refrained Reddit users jumped on speculation and trusted misinformation. Soon enough, even benign information like spotting casual similarities between potential suspects was being presented as “evidence”, and inevitably this led to several people being wrongly identified by the masses as the perpetrators of the bombing. And soon the lynch mobs dawned on various innocent people in such pretty ugly cases of trial by social media.
One of the biggest victims of this amateur sleuthing was the family of Sunil Tripathi. Sunil had been missing for a month at the time of the bombings and had a passing resemblance to the identified suspects. This apparently was enough for many Reddit users to assume that he was responsible, and a campaign to hunt him down began, attracting thousands.
The existing Facebook Page dedicated to help finding him was overcome with speculation and vile abuse directed at Sunil and his family, and his photo was spread throughout the Internet, identifying him as a Boston bomber, as if it was a forgone conclusion. Of course Sunil was innocent, and wasn’t even alive for any of it. His body was eventually found in a nearby wood. The forum moderator for the Reddit thread apologised to his family for the mistake.
However despite that apology, Sunil’s name will forever be affiliated with a barbaric crime committed by callous murderers, and that’s something his family will have to live with forever.
Sunil wasn’t the only person misidentified either. Salah Barhoum was also identified on Reddit and made it to the New York Post and had to go to the authorities to clear his name. Other unidentified men had their images spread through social media as well.
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One of the more common reasons why innocent people wind up on the receiving end of violent online diatribes spewed by the online lynch mob brigade is because they were simply unlucky enough to share the same name with the intended target.
In 2013 viral images of a woman named Melissa Bachman went into overdrive. The photos showed Bachman standing in front of a lion she had just killed. She was a big game hunter, a vocation that needless to say is a controversial one, and one that means she has to deal with plenty of online hate being directed towards her.
However, a second and unaffiliated Melissa Bachmann (notice the minor spelling difference) got caught up in the situation when online “sleuths” looking to give the big game hunter a piece of their mind found themselves at her Twitter account instead. And from there came a relentless flurry of hate and death threats.
” Someone should shoot your kids and take pics” wrote one user.
Despite complaining to Twitter and defending herself multiple times to her accusers, the second Melissa Bachmann was unable to deter the messages sent her way, which were relentless.
Needless to say, Bachmann feared for her safety and dreaded the prospect that her address could have been leaked online by somebody. And all of this because Internet users could take the time to direct hateful and often threat-laden messages toward her but couldn’t take the shorter amount of time to check that her Twitter account had nothing to do with the person they meant to be addressing.
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The Internet and social media can be useful conduit for communication, expressing opinions, and even helping with investigations. Yet this is no excuse for what is essentially a 21st century equivalent of angry crowd mobs with flames and pitchforks.
The simple reality is that there is no place for such witch hunts in civilised society, whether it’s online or off. Yet in the world of social media, which seems to be too often dominated by either pointlessness or outrage, it seems that when we’re not sharing silly images of cute puppies or date night mealtimes, we can too easily be caught up in finding an outlet for whatever apparent barbarity is occurring at that time, even if that means directing our misplaced anger at individuals.
And mob mentality makes it all that much worse. Psychological studies tell us that crowdsourcing lowers our inhibitions, and when everyone is pointing their anger at an apparent injustice, no one wants to be left behind.
Critical thinking goes out of the window, along with one’s ability to verify or analyse. And what is left behind could very well be a life in tatters. Potentially an innocent one.
Think twice before engaging in these witch hunts. One day they could be targeted at you.
