When social media goes wrong

The learnings from Boston suggest that India's police need to make a conscious effort to use social media with due care

The news has been surreal, moving beyond the mundaneness of Iraqi suicide bombers and Delhi child rape-murders. A fertiliser plant explosion in West, Texas, caused at least 70 deaths. There was also a bad earthquake in Iran and that is when farce followed close on the heels of tragedy.

A mullah confidently identified the proximate cause of earthquakes as the promiscuous behaviour of women. To add to the Alice in Wonderland atmosphere, the Saudis then expelled three handsome men from a cultural festival for fear that they would arouse promiscuous passions and, perhaps, trigger more earthquakes.

But all this was trumped by the Boston blasts, which drew more attention. Boston saw fewer deaths than Texas, Iraq or Iran. So, the media's priorities may seem warped. News focus should correlate to the scale of a tragedy, or - if one applies crass commercial calculus - to the economic damage.

An entire town was levelled in Texas. But Boston-MIT-Watertown got more coverage. This is because terrorism in the US trumps almost anything in terms of the trends on social media. Since mainstream media follows social media in breaking news, MSM also takes its coverage cues from social media trends.

The coverage of Boston-MIT-Watertown highlighted the strengths and exposed the weaknesses of social media. Social media got going ahead of other channels. It also crowd-sourced some vital data. But it jumped the shark with one massive error.

MSM is usually 10-15 minutes behind the interwebs. Even in Boston, social media outpaced the multiple TV crews present. Tweeple need not filter images for quality or graphic content. Many don't bother to spellcheck, let alone fact-check updates. Many share tweets on Facebook, so that's next in line. The search engines also kick in quickly.

The Boston marathon audience was tweeting when the blasts occurred. In the aftermath, the authorities mixed and matched that data to CCTV and MSM footage. A blogger had taken some clear pictures of one suspect.

Even as the shoot-out occurred in MIT and then Watertown, social media identified Suspect #2 as a missing student from Brown University. Netizens built entertaining conspiracy theories linking a supposed Ethiopian (Suspect #1) and an ABCD (Suspect #2) (nb: try not to expand ABCD 'tis not PC).

Only, social media was wrong. The misidentification spread like wildfire. One man on Reddit had patched together a resemblance between the missing student and Suspect #2. This was confidently multi-tweeted as a confirmed ID. The student's disappearance remains a mystery. His family has suffered a lot of embarrassment too.

The networks didn't cover themselves with glory at Boston. One of them jumped the gun in announcing arrests. But the social media error was far more egregious because it hurt the reputation of an innocent man and distressed his family.

The learnings from Boston suggest that India's police need to make a conscious effort to use social media more effectively but also with due care. Arguably, the ubiquitous camera-phone has already led to positive changes in crowd control methods. If images by citizens at, say, the Bangalore blast or in future terrorist attacks are examined, they may yield valuable data. But if the police follow through on shaming convicted rapists by putting their mugshots on websites, it could trigger the lynching of innocent people with chance resemblances to the criminals.

Finally, there is an underlying logic to the fascination with terrorism. It is an exhibitionist act; it wants to be noticed. It succeeds because it is gory and because policy makers throw money at it in knee-jerk fashion. The impact of even an aborted terror strike is felt in the taxes diverted. About 120 Indians die in road accidents for every one that is killed in a terrorist attack, but far more is spent on counter-terrorism than on road safety.

The crowd will, eventually, spontaneously develop rules of social media engagement. Obviously the authorities must learn to use these channels effectively. But it is more urgent to develop a new matrix for the cost-benefit analysis of counterterrorist measures.