Social Media's Role In The Boston Bombing

As our world evolves, more and more people every day jump onto the social media train. Many people are advocates of social media because it helps them communicate. However, other people oppose the use of social media because they question its credibility. Social media’s credibility played a big role in the Boston bombing events that took place on April 15th, 2013. Two bombs went off at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring over 200 others (Ziv). Thus, as herds of people were rushed to the hospital or evacuated, the manhunt for the criminal responsible went on for the rest of the week. As time went on, law enforcement identified the suspects as brothers—Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. As the search narrowed

According to Starbird’s article, in a time of “crisis events, a large percentage of tweets are retweets, which spread very quickly” (Starbird 655). In addition to this, “50% of retweets occur in the first hour after a tweet is shared and 75% within the first day” (Starbird 655). This means that during the Boston bombings, which was a time of crisis, posts on Twitter got around quickly because of the retweet function, causing possible misinformation about the bombings to spread more rapidly than usual. Even an hour, much less a day, was enough for the amounts of misinformation on social media to start spinning out of control. An example of a tweet like this included “@TylerJWalter (April 15, 2013 7:15pm): An eight year old girl who was doing an amazing thing running a marathon, was killed. I can’t stand our world anymore” (Starbird). This is an example of misinformation that spread quickly because it was tweeted on the same day as the bombings, and because an eight year old girl did not die in the bombings (Nova). In an instance where the situation got to be haywire, the documentary Nova: Manhunt - Boston Bombers, mentioned that innocent people started getting accused of carrying out the bombing themselves because of false information being put out by users on sites such as Twitter, reddit, and 4chan