Katie Rucke
News that bombs had detonated at the Boston Marathon on Monday largely came from social media sites instead of traditional news sources, as spectators and participants at the scene took out their phones, iPads and tablets to share footage, photos and personal experiences through social media channels like Twitter, Facebook and even Reddit.
“I was first notified to the event by my daughter, who was on Twitter, and that was before it came out on CNN,” said Anthony C. Roman, president of a security consulting firm in New York called Roman and Associates.
Realizing the important role of social media during the aftermath of the incident, the Boston Globe temporarily converted its homepage into a live blog that gathered tweets from Boston authorities, news outlets and ordinary citizens. The hope was that amongst all the 140-character tweets, authorities would be able to discover what had happened.
The hashtag “#BostonMarathon” was trending nationally Monday, as was “#PrayForBoston”.
The Boston Police Department tweeted asking for tips from the public and ordinary citizens acted as reporters and shared information not only related to what they were seeing in terms of injuries, but also encouraged willing and able persons to donate blood at a local hospital.
While social media sites, namely Twitter, have been blamed in the past for rapidly spreading misinformation, such as the rumor of two shooters at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut — many social media skeptics admitted the future of news via social media may not be as awful as many once thought. Some even went so far to say that social media networks may be maturing into trusted sources.
Even terrorism experts applauded the use of social media after the Boston Marathon bombings, saying that the social media response helped authorities determine their next steps.
“Authorities have recognized that one of the first places people go in events like this is to social media, to see what the crowd is saying about what to do next,” said Bill Braniff, executive director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Response to Terrorism. “And today authorities went to Twitter and directed them to traditional media environments where authorities can present a clear calm picture of what to do next.”
Citizen journalism
One user on Reddit, created a thread to provide live updates to the public as information unraveled. By Tuesday morning, the thread had 58 updates, which were an eclectic mix of Twitter statuses, videos and still images, written updates from news organizations, reports from first responders and police scanners, and more.
“All the media provides a tremendous asset for the forensic evaluation of the explosion event,” said Roman. “Authorities can start examining the pictures and tapes looking for individuals near the receptacles where the bombs were found and individuals not fitting the profile of the general spectator can be identified.”
Citizen response
As news broke of the bombings, many people turned to social media to express either sympathy for the victims or rage for the bombings.
One of the most shared Facebook posts about the incident came from comedian Patton Oswalt, who compared reactions to the Boston Marathon to those after 9/11.
“I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, ‘Well, I’ve had it with humanity.’ But I was wrong. I don’t know what’s going to be revealed to be behind all of this mayhem. One human insect or a poisonous mass of broken sociopaths.
“But here’s what I DO know. If it’s one person or a HUNDRED people, that number is not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population on this planet. You watch the videos of the carnage and there are people running TOWARDS the destruction to help out ….
“So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, ‘The good outnumber you, and we always will.’”
While there were a plethora of supportive posts for the victims and those in the Boston area, some used the bombings as an opportunity to target groups of people like Muslims.
Those responsible for the bombings have yet to come forward, but that didn’t stop Fox News contributor Erik Rush from tweeting that all Muslims should be killed in response to the bombings. Tweets like Rush’s led to “#Muslims” trending on Twitter and sparked an anti-Islamic discussion.
Heroes: overcoming tragedy
Individual responses to the tragedy showed a dark, hateful side for some, but put others in a heroic light.
Many pictures shared on social media sites of the aftermath included a man wearing a cowboy hat, Carlos Arredondo, aiding victims who had lost limbs. One image that has become an iconic photo of Monday’s aftermath includes Arredondo, who appears to be holding a man’s severed artery.
“I kept talking to him. I kept saying, ‘Stay with me, stay with me,'” Arredondo later said.
It turns out Arredondo is a Red Cross disaster team member and peace activist, whose 20-year-old son, Alexander, had been killed during his second tour of duty in Iraq in 2004, and his son, Brian, killed himself in 2011. Brian was 24.
Already old news?
Not even 24 hours after the bombings, much of the nation is still talking about the tragedy that occurred at the Boston Marathon, but the discussion is much more muted than it was yesterday.
Libby Hemphill is a professor who studies social media at the Illinois Institute of Technology. She says she has noticed a big difference in how people use social media to react to national disasters like Hurricane Sandy compared with human-created events like the Boston Marathon bombings.
Hemphill says that during a natural disaster people didn’t stop documenting the aftermath in pictures and video, but just hours after the bombing occurred yesterday, documentation was winding down.
“Right after the explosions happened, we saw a lot of photographs, but that’s dropped off now,” she says. “People have stopped documenting and now are trying to make sense of what happened.”