As you know, on Apr 15 2013, two bombs exploded during the Boston Marathon, killing 3 people and injuring 264. Naturally, reddit ‘blew up’ as well, as being a social media site, it’s a haven for current news. Two of the biggest subreddits to post information were /r/worldnews and /r/news. Being that /r/worldnews is only for posting non-US news stories, they began removing the posts from there, which angered a lot of people. As more people went over to the posts in /r/news, the admins realised that they needed a primary US news subreddit that wasn’t politically based, so /r/news was added to the defaults.

Over the next few days, the Internet turned on Batman Mode, and started posting pictures and theories to ‘help’ identify the bad guys. One person was Sunil Tripathi, who had gone missing on Apr 16. This misidentification ignited a witchhunt, which only ceased when the current suspects were found by actual authorities. On Apr 22, the admins made a blog post apologising to Sunil’s family for the grievances caused, among other things. On Apr 23, Sunil’s body was discovered in a river.

It should be noted that the misidentification was not just reddit’s fault; other websites such as 4chan were also failing at playing detective too.