Four social media lessons from the Boston attacks

A tornado of media and social media coverage is swirling around the terror attack on the Boston Marathon, which killed three people and injured nearly 200. One suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnev, was fatally wounded in a gun battle with the police.

The second suspect, Dzhokhar, Tamerlan’s  19-year-old brother, has been captured by the police from a backyard boat. We have not heard the end of the saga of the Tsarnev Brothers. India’s cops could learn a lot from The Boston Police. In the days ahead, as investigations proceed, there could be more tangible evidence about  ‘why’ and ‘how’ such violence struck a joyful and iconic event as the Boston Marathon in one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

Meanwhile, there are important takeaways for the rest of us: first, we have to rein in our inner Sherlock Holmes every time there is a blast somewhere. This is critical for those who see themselves as citizen-detectives and are twitter-happy. Second, if some of us absolutely must hold forth in public, we must be savvier about maps and chaps who happen to be different from those we know well.

Third, we have to recognise that terrorist attacks can be perpetrated by those who defy the stereotype of what terrorists are — terrorists do not always look like ‘them’, the demonised ‘other’. Sometimes, they are, or were, till a certain point, just like ‘us’. Last, and very important, all of us have to understand that some people may be using the internet or text messages for nefarious purposes, and we need to be more sceptical when we see such messages.

This is not just an American problem. It is equally important for us in India to not buy into the oversimplified or malicious narratives that others seek to foist upon us. Last year, there was a panic exodus of people of Northeast from Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad and other cities following rumours, spread through SMS, that Muslims were planning an attack on people of the Northeast, to avenge the deaths in ethnic clashes between Bodos and Muslims in Assam’s Kokrajhar district.

Even if we discount such vested misinformation, what happened on the social media in the wake of the Boston attacks shows the damage under-informed and overenthusiastic online sleuths can do. The consequences have been an eerie blend of the tragic and the darkly comic.

To begin with the comedy of terror. The Tsarnev Brothers, prime suspects in the bomb attacks in Boston, are reported to be ethnically Chechen who lived in Kyrgyzstan and who moved to the United States years ago. Dzhokhar arrived in the US when he was eight and is an American citizen. However, only their Chechen ethnicity ignited mass excitement in the social media.

Twitterati went into overdrive about the ills of conflict-ravaged Chechnya. Some saw a link between Chechnya’s troubles and the tragedy at Boston. Some had not had the time or the inclination to look up Chechnya in the map, and mixed it up with the Czech Republic. The ambassador of the Czech Republic to the United States, Petr Gandalovic, had to put out a terse statement expressing his concern about this “most unfortunate misunderstanding” in the social media. “The Czech Republic and Chechnya are two very different entities — the Czech Republic is a Central European country; Chechnya is a part of the Russian Federation...”

The dangerous cocktail of ignorance and enthusiasm had other fall-outs. There is the by-now-famous fiasco over Sunil Tripathi, a student at Brown University, who has been missing since March. Mutterings picked up from the police scanner were combined with the perceived resemblance of Tripathi to one of the Boston bombing suspects, so Sherlock Holmes-came-lately held forth for hours about Tripathi’s religion, caste, origin and so forth till the Boston police zeroed in on the Tsarnev Brothers.

Any journalist who has been on the ‘crime beat’ or done ‘city reporting’ understands that the police scanner (radio receiver) is a source of rumours, possibly tip-offs which can be followed up, but definitely not a reliable source of information and not to be taken as a repository of confirmed facts. But not everyone among the twitter-happy got that.

Such misinformation can have serious consequences. “Tamerlan and Dzhokhar are not Sunil Tripathi,” noted The Atlantic Wire.com. But try imagining how the parents, family and friends of Tripathi felt when citizen-detectives were airing their views about Tripathi as a terror suspect though the Boston Police had not once mentioned his name in any public platform.

Then, there was the hullabaloo about a “Saudi suspect” who turned out to be another man injured in the Boston bomb blasts. Why was he the subject of searches and so much media scrutiny? As Amy Davidson points out in her brilliant article in The New Yorker, The Saudi Marathon Man, “He was running — so was everyone. The police reportedly thought he smelled like explosives; his wounds might have suggested why…. He asked if anyone was dead — a question people were screaming. And he was from Saudi Arabia, which is around where the logic stops...”

This was not all. A flight to Chicago was brought back to Boston because two men on that plane — not sitting next to each other — were speaking Arabic, according to media reports.

One could argue that violence has a numbing effect on the brain and you can’t expect those who have been hit by a bomb to always think rationally or objectively. Arguably, fear is the key at such moments. But to understand and prevent terrorist attacks, we have to grapple with the misinformation, stereotyping and scare-mongering of the “other” (anyone who looks or behaves differently). Every time we stick labels on people and try to analyse violence solely through the ‘us and them’ prism, we widen the cracks. Nothing could make terrorists happier.

The author is a Delhi-based writer.