But imagine seeing your missing son's face and name associated with a deadly atrocity. Imagine that.

In general, Reddit doesn't approve of doxxings for this very reason. But Redditors have a long history of selectively enforcing these rules. In the case of the Boston Marathon Bombings suspects, Reddit decided it was okay not just to seek out but toidentify the people it thought was involved, for all of the Internet — and the world — to see. Of course, there is some value in using crowdsourced information as clues. A man who snapped a a photo and posted it to his Facebook happened to catch a picture of what looked like the suspect. It ultimately made its way to Reddit and then into the FBI's hands, and The New York Times. That's arguably different than going wild searching out for people with similar faces and colorings as some blurry photos. The FBI did ask for help — "The response from the community has been tremendous," the co-founder of a new FBI tip site told The Boston Globe last night — but it didn't ask for allegations to be made publicly: In releasing 12 images Friday night, FBI special agent in charge Richard DesLauriers said that "these images should be the only ones, I emphasize the only ones, that the public should view to assist us. Other photos should not be deemed credible and they unnecessarily divert the public's attention in the wrong direction and create undue work for vital law enforcement resources."

Turns out, it wasn't the new photo sleuthing that misdirected social media and the mainstream media — it was the naming of names. It was the above-and-beyond trolling that Reddit tries to counteract, but which Reddit can't keep from escaping into the wild as the media continues to trust its influence. Of course the blame doesn't just fall on Reddit, where apologies are flooding in — or 4Chan, which was also sleuthing for Boston — and the people who took them as seriously as confirmed police reporting are the ones who may have been taken the outing from viral to hurtful. Looking for the "scoop" on a story, some over excitable journalists connected the Boston scanner, Twitter feed and all, to the theories elsewhere online. But cops talking on a radio sometimes don't provide any more confirmation than trolls posting on a subreddit — combined, they are dangerous to people's lives, in an already all-too-dangerous situation.

On Monday, one media critic called Twitter the press's ombudsman, giving a more sober, slower, measured version of the news, having learned the lessons of Newtown. For a moment, it seemed like the Internet had redeemed itself. Then Thursday night bled into Friday morning, and as a truly chaotic police situation unfolded, the seedy underbelly of the Internet left some good names maimed in public. In perhaps a strange bit of irony, Reddit got hacked.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

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