Mr Dent wrote:It appears those people are utterly innocent.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22214511
http://www.smh.com.au/world/teen-wrongly-identified-as-person-connected-with-boston-marathon-blasts-20130419-2i3zb.html
Real news outlets really need to look at their processes of verifying information before publishing it. Publishing hearsay and gossip is simply dumb as fuck.
...
If they want to help they should compile all the relevant data and forward it to the professionals (Police, FBI) without naming their own damn suspects.
The 4chan thread was just trying to compile pictures, dig through them, talk about them, working the data. That's probably the same thing they were doing on reddit and the other big forums. Crowdsourced investigations have some responsibility to get the data right, but I agree that news organizations should still be held to a higher standard.
And thanks for all the links and info. Pretty sobering stuff.