To Catch a Redditor

A while back, I posted about a conflict between two website audiences - YTMND and Ebaumsworld. There was some controversy over content ownership, which resulted in an organized movement against Ebaumsworld by YTMND's community. Participants (probably having an average age of 14) jokingly referred to the event as "World Wide Web War 1".

Of course, that was back in 2006. The Internet's changed a lot since then - communities have grown larger and more heterogeneous. You wouldn't ever expect to see a spat break out between two website communities in this day and age, right?

Click to enlarge, and learn just how wrong you are.

In 2012, members of SomethingAwful's community launched an organized effort to shut down Reddit's vilest sub-forums - and won. Here is a story of equal parts social justice, online vigilantism, and inter-community drama.

Most of this story (and article title, too) is shamelessly taken from a SomethingAwful thread that you could probably read yourself, but it would require forums registration that is not free. It's a shame, because I think watching the narrative unfold is very entertaining. Hopefully, after reading this post, you're left with a sense of amusement and moral satisfaction.

Internet Vigilantism

Perhaps you heard about the bombings that happened at the Boston marathon last week. The FBI got involved. And so did the Internet.

Pictured: Some poor saps with backpacks. Unheard of in a college-dense city like Boston.

Reddit, 4chan, and some other Internet communities decided to comb through public footage of the Boston marathon. Their aim was to find the marathon bombers themselves, and to piece together the narrative behind the event. After all, they had all the same resources as the FBI, minus the criminal database, the forensic evidence, witness testimony, and all of those other "extra" things.

These internet detectives assembled an extensive gallery of "suspicious" people. Tabloids found these pictures, printed them, and circulated them. When the FBI released blurry photos of the two suspects, the Internet communities doubled down on their efforts. They reduced their list of suspicious people to a middle-eastern-looking guy named Sunil Tripathi, who had gone missing prior to the bombing. People ate up the possibility that the person responsible for the bombings had been identified.

And then it turned out that the Internet got it completely wrong. It wasn't Sunil Tripathi. It was two Chechen brothers (which must have been a relief for middle-eastern people dealing with unwarranted backlash about this already). Of course, that didn't stop people from going on a completely misinformed witch hunt for the first guy before the debunking. And it isn't stopping crackpots from trying to continue that witch hunt. Oops.

This is internet vigilantism - and in this case, it misfired. These events demonstrate the power of the online sphere in shaping public opinion. The Internet can also have a stake in the action themselves, with users often getting involved in pursuing criminals and other targets. This phenomenon has happened before, and it will probably happen again. What is the anatomy of online vigilante justice, and what can be learned from its failure here?