Some articles on mistaken identity in the Boston bombings

Some people think that the social media rush to try to ID the bombers was useful, or harmless.

They should consider what it was like to be misidentified.

What's more, I don't think it has been established yet than any of the crowdsourcing amateur detective players did actually get the right suspects.  They certainly were not at the top of the list.

While you probably couldn't say that the geeky participants at Reddit were predominantly of one political stripe (in fact, being younger, you would have to suspect they probably leaned left), but outside of those sites, it seems clear that it was the right wing press and right wingnut-o-sphere that promoted the alleged identifications with gusto.  Especially if the suspect was one of those swarthy types.   

Here's what follows:

The same week that the New York Post first falsely reported the Boston bombing suspect was  a Saudi national then falsely put a Moroccan-American track runner on its cover, it accurately reported on Friday an attack on an innocent Bangladeshi man living in the Bronx who some "idiots" mistook for an Arab. Abdullah Faruque, a South Asian network engineer, was at an Applebees on Monday night when he was accosted by a group of three or four men, reports the Post, after they asked if he was an Arab. It wasn't until he got home, his shoulder dislocated, that he found out about the bombing at the Boston Marathon. “I saw the news, and then it hits me: That’s why I got jumped,” he told the Post.

It's possible for this sort of baseless revenge to happen, with or without the Post's help. But it's worth wonderng where these men— and the one who assaulted a Muslim doctor in Boston, and the ones who vandalized the future site of a Boston mosque—got the idea for taking out revenge on a "dark skinned male"  in the wake of the bombing.

The right wingnut-o-sphere has also been pretty creative in trying to save face:  the Saudi student in hospital went from being a prime suspect under police guard, to an innocent man, to a man about to be deported for terrorist connections anyway.   A clear denial from Washington was countered by an anonymous "Congressional source" who spoke to the Blaze that "a file had been opened" and he really, really was going to be deported.  (I suspect that only a nutty right wing source would talk to The Blaze - which appears to have a particular fondness for Glenn Beck, who is going berzerkoid on the issue.)   This has set off the wingnut conspiracy theorist (see comments following The Blaze story).

Meanwhile, given that the actual bombers are Muslim, and it is looking likely that they are inspired by radical Islam, the right wing blogosphere is already bleating at huge volume at anyone who dared speculate on it being another version of Timothy McVeigh. 

Never mind that domestic anti-government extremism was indeed behind the biggest ever domestic terrorism incident outside of 9-11.

And never mind that, at The Blaze, following the story about the Saudi student, we have a typical example of wingnut rhetoric about civil war that has become extremely common, especially since gun control became an issue:

Yeah, according to the Right wing nutters, there is no legitimacy at all in journalists wondering if the bombing could be from their political side of the fence.   They don't recognize their own paranoia.

And finally, at Slate, Farhad Manjoo is swearing off participating in Tweeting on such events.  

A good idea, I think.

Update:  As another article in Slate says:

After a week in which Reddit’s r/findbostonbombers page rocketed to prominence—and controversy—as a hub for crowd-sourced criminal investigations, the FBI’s two main suspects are dead or in custody. And Reddit had nothing to do with it.