Should Reddit Be Blamed for the Spreading of a Smear?

F.B.I. via Getty Images; Tripathi FamilyWhen a picture of Sunil Tripathi (right) was posted on Reddit alongside an image of Suspect No. 2 in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings, it fueled speculation that they were the same person.

On an overcast day in early May, I traveled to suburban Philadelphia to visit the family of Sunil Tripathi, the deceased 22-year-old Brown University student who, for about four hours on the morning of April 19, was mistakenly identified as Suspect No. 2 in the Boston Marathon bombings. The Tripathis had just arrived home after nearly two months spent in Providence, R.I., where they went to organize the search for Sunil, who disappeared on March 16. When I entered the house, Judy Tripathi, Sunil’s mother, asked me for a hug. In a shattered voice, she said, “I need hugs these days.” We sat at the kitchen table and talked, and at one point Judy handed me a photo of a young, smiling Sunil, caught in the motion of throwing a ball. “Look how happy he looks,” she said. For the next two hours, she and her husband, Akhil, and their daughter, Sangeeta, described what happened to them in the early-morning hours of April 19, and how the false identification of their son derailed their ongoing search for him and further traumatized their lives.

At 5 p.m. on April 18, three days after the bombs went off at the marathon finish line, the F.B.I. released grainy photographs of two suspects. For the past month, the Tripathis had been renting a house and spending their days working with F.B.I. agents, Brown administrators and an organization dedicated to finding missing persons. Early on in the search, the family created a Facebook page called “Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi,” which included video messages from family and friends and recent images of Sunil — walking the beach with his older brother, Ravi; attending his sister’s graduation ceremony; posing with his mother at a Phillies game.

Minutes after the world first saw the suspects’ photos, a user on Reddit, the online community that is also one of the largest Web sites in the world, posted side-by-side pictures comparing Sunil’s facial features with the face that would later be identified as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The pictures were accompanied by speculation about the circumstances surrounding Sunil’s disappearance and the F.B.I.’s involvement in his search. By 8 p.m., three hours after the F.B.I. released the suspects’ photos, angry messages began to appear on the Tripathi’s Facebook page, and at 8:15 Ravi received a phone call from a reporter at ABC News in New York, who asked if Sunil had been spotted in Boston and if Ravi had seen the F.B.I. photos of Suspect No. 2. Ravi, unclear at what she was getting at, told her there had been no word from Sunil. As the minutes passed and the volume of threatening Facebook messages increased, the Tripathis finally called their F.B.I. contact in Providence, who assured them that nobody within his office believed that Sunil was Suspect No. 2.

The family had been told that missing people sometimes go to libraries or other places with free Internet service, where they type their own names into search engines to track their cases. The Facebook page was created with the hope that if Sunil searched for himself, he would find loving messages from his family and friends. Now they worried that he would see what was being written about him and take drastic measures to harm himself. Around 11 p.m., at roughly the same time that the news came out that Sean Collier, a 27-year-old police officer at M.I.T., had been shot and killed, the Tripathis closed the page so that no more messages could come in.

The removal of “Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi” was noted by several people in the media, including Sasha Stone, who runs an inside-Hollywood Web site called Awards Daily. At 10:56 p.m., Stone tweeted: “I’m sure by now the @fbipressoffice is looking into this dude” and included a link to the Facebook page. Seven minutes later, she tweeted: “Seconds after I sent that tweet the page is gone off of Facebook. If you can cache it . . .” For Erik Malinowski, a senior sportswriter at the Web site BuzzFeed, the takedown of “Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi” was noteworthy enough to pass along. At midnight, Malinowski, whose Twitter following includes a number of journalists, tweeted: “FYI: A Facebook group dedicated to finding Sunil Tripathi, the missing Brown student, was deleted this evening.” Roughly 300 Twitter users retweeted Malinowski’s post, including the pop-culture blogger Perez Hilton, who sent Sunil Tripathi’s name out to more than six million followers. From there, the small, contained world of speculation exploded on every social-media platform. Several journalists began tweeting out guarded thoughts about Sunil’s involvement. If the family had taken down the Facebook page, the reasoning went, it must mean that the Tripathis had seen their missing son in the grainy photos of Suspect No. 2.

Bombings Trip Up Reddit in Its Turn in Spotlight

After site members, known as Redditors, turned into amateur sleuths and ended up wrongly identifying several people as possible suspects, Reddit went from a font of crowdsourced information to a purveyor of false accusations, to the subject of a reprimand by the president of the United States himself, to the center of another furious debate about the responsibilities of digital media.

Last Monday, Erik Martin, the site’s general manager, posted an apology, saying, “Activity on Reddit fueled online witch hunts and dangerous speculation which spiraled into very negative consequences for innocent parties. The Reddit staff and the millions of people on Reddit around the world deeply regret that this happened.”

In a subsequent interview, however, Mr. Martin was unclear about how it might play out differently in the future.  “We could have reminded people about our rules on the disclosure of personal information; we could have shut down the subReddit earlier than the moderators shut it down,” he suggested. (SubReddit is a name for a subject forum where a thread or threads of conversation develop on the site.)

But, he added, except for higher vigilance and a moderation of discussion “tone,” the site was not ready to institute new rules of behavior. “Reddit is a sort of attention aggregator,” he said. “It can tell you what to pay attention to, but it is certainly not a replacement for news reporting.”

While Reddit has never pretended to be a news organization, it is learning that as it grows bigger and more influential, the rest of the world expects it to exercise judgment — judgment that is often at odds with the freewheeling culture it and its members prize. (Internet host sites are shielded by federal law from liability for the speech of their users.)

Other sites have felt the need to police themselves after being scrutinized in similar situations. Craigslist, which carries classified ads of all kinds, suspended its sex-related offerings in 2010 after more than a dozen state attorneys general threatened action against it, complaining that it was promoting prostitution. Last year Google, the owner of YouTube, blocked a video that mocked Islam in Libya and Egypt as violent reaction to the video spread in those countries.

This is not the first time Reddit has found itself in an embarrassing situation, and by some accounts the timing now could not be worse.

“They are sort of a subculture ready to break into the mainstream, and it is too bad this was the moment,” said Robert Quigley, a senior lecturer for the College of Communication at the University of Texas, Austin.

Started in 2005 by two University of Virginia graduates, Reddit is essentially an updated version of the electronic bulletin board in which registered users, anonymous or otherwise, can post a comment or a link on a topic deemed worthy (subjects vary from pornography to cat tricks to science). Users can then vote the posts up or down as they add their own commentary.

The most popular posts appear on Reddit’s home page. A recent example is a bizarre picture of the teenage idol Justin Bieber in a ski mask with a bodyguard in a zippered one-piece sweatsuit.

The site’s traffic has more than doubled in the last 12 months, and it currently reports some 62 million unique visitors a month. It was acquired by Condé Nast Publications in 2006, but in 2012 was spun off as a separate entity. Advance Publications, Condé Nast’s parent company, remains the largest stockholder.

Although it is not a news organization, Reddit is used by young people as a place where they can tap into trends that do not appear on mainstream sites. It has also become an in-the-know stop for celebrities and politicians looking to gain traction with that age group. President Obama made Reddit his last official campaign stop in the waning hours of the 2012 election.

Like many digital operations, Reddit, which is based in San Francisco, keeps its staff mean and lean. It has 25 employees, and uses volunteers to police its Web site to make sure rules are obeyed. Among Reddit’s basic rules are a prohibition against vote manipulation, spam, child pornography and revealing other people’s personal information.

Still, anyone who starts a subReddit essentially becomes its dictator, deciding who can moderate and who has access. This has not always turned out so well.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 29, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the year of a CNN investigation into content on Reddit posted under the title Jailbait. It was 2011, not 2010. An earlier correction misstated the year as 2012. In that year CNN conducted an interview with Michael Brutsch, who previously moderated Jailbait.

Bits Blog: Ellen Pao, Who Sued Kleiner Perkins, Joins Reddit

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Ellen Pao, a former partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

You still can’t ask Ellen Pao anything. But Reddit announced Thursday that the former venture capitalist will now be working with the social networking site, home of the popular Ask Me Anything chats.

Ms. Pao shocked Silicon Valley when she filed a discrimination suit last spring against her employer at the time, the legendary venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. The suit was much debated but brought up widespread accusations that the Valley, for all its 21st-century tech, had medieval attitudes toward women. Ms. Pao has maintained her silence about the suit.

Yishan Wong, Reddit’s chief executive, said on the company’s blog that Ms. Pao had been “a formal and informal adviser to Reddit for more than a year, and recently decided to finally join us full time. She’ll be working on helping us build strategic partnerships that benefit the community.”

Ms. Pao herself went on to add: “I grew up in Maplewood, New Jersey, raised by enginerds on ‘Star Wars,’ computers and books. I live in San Francisco, via New York City, Boston and Hong Kong. I’ve worked with dozens of tech companies, traveling to 11 countries on five continents, to help build a variety of consumer and business platform companies.”

She said her favorite Reddit categories were Ask Me Anything and pareidolia, which is pictures of things that look like things they are not (trees that seem to have faces, etc). That is a perfect choice, because a court will eventually decide whether her suit is what it says it is or is something else entirely.

Bits: A Reddit Forum Prompts Questions of Where to Draw a Line

Jane Jacobs, an urban activist, made that observation in 1961 in her landmark book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” Although she was describing cities built of bricks and mortar, her ideas about cultivating vibrancy feel relevant today, as some of the most important metropolises of the 21st century are being constructed online, where chaos is in no short supply.

The latest controversy surrounds Reddit, a community and social news site that lets members create and run their own forums on any topic, from movie news to local politics to the sharing of beautiful nature photographs. Reddit has come under fire for harboring a forum that encourages people to covertly photograph women on the street and upload the images to the site for others to ogle and comment on. The pictures, nicknamed “creepshots,” incited outrage and provoked other members of the site and some journalists to publicly out those distributing the suggestive images. These actions, in turn, prompted an outcry from those who felt that they should be able to retain their own anonymity while posting photographs of women without their consent.

The skirmish has set off a debate about privacy and free speech, ownership and community, digital rights and accountability, touching upon issues of privilege and the undercurrents of power that course through the Web. At its core, the fallout is about how we transport social order, morals and responsibility to the digital realm and whether the online infrastructure can find a weird wisdom in the way it is being erected that will allow all its inhabitants to flourish.

Reddit is just one Web site — and one that many people have never heard of, at that. But it wields a sizable chunk of influence online, playing an instrumental role in rallying the Web to halt the progression of antipiracy bills proposed by Congress earlier this year, as well as enticing President Obama into its virtual halls to answer questions submitted by its members. It also drives significant amounts of traffic around the Web each month.

Zeynep Tufekci, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, described the site as “the secret backbone of the Internet,” which is why it is even more crucial that it be accountable for the environment it is fostering, she said.

“Reddit is not just a cog in the machine,” she said. “It may not be the most visible site, but is a powerful platform.”

Of course, Reddit isn’t the only Web site struggling with these issues. Such creepshots appear on other places around the Web, including Twitter. And sites from YouTube to Instagram, the photo-sharing app, are grappling with how to address provocative content, from images depicting self-harm to violent torture videos, and where to draw the line about what to publish and what to remove.

But the discussion around Reddit feels particularly pertinent because it is a site that deftly straddles the old Web and the new, managing to house the wondrous and the freewheeling, an antidote to the mainstream social networking sites where advertising and data-mining can seem more important than the conversations and community they contain.

As more of our life migrates online, the digital domains where we spend so much time may be as influential and important as the towns where we choose to go to school, find jobs and raise our families. The gap between who we are online and who we are offline is closing, said Katie Baker, a writer for Jezebel, who has been covering the skirmishes around Reddit. “It is increasingly clear-cut that we can no longer think that way,” she said.

Reddit, like Ms. Jacobs’s great cities, is a hub of interaction and civilization. And if one population feels marginalized within it, as many women and men who oppose those forums do, it detracts from the overall health of the community.

Those turned off by Reddit’s policies, which the company has no plans to amend despite the blowup, could always find a new place online to roost. But in Ms. Jacobs’ book, the cities that drive people away rather than deal with their unsavory bits begin to deteriorate and decay, and eventually wither.

In other words, averting our eyes and avoiding certain forums won’t solve the problem of how to deal with those forums when they tolerate and encourage attitudes of hostility and exploitation of women and underage girls.

Reddit is not an island. It is a site with 19 million users a month, according to Quantcast, one that is inexorably linked to the rest of the Web, and its community’s ideas, memes and images migrate from its front page to a larger online world. While it is owned by Advance Publications, which also owns Condé Nast, it is largely independent.