Crowdsourcing and leak tactics repeatedly misfired and produced false accusations

Evidence

Even grassroots online activism faced setbacks. Crowdsourcing, once heralded as a democratic tool, became a cautionary tale. Reddit users wrongly identified a missing Brown student as the Boston Marathon bomber in 2013. Anonymous, initially seen as a force for justice, named the wrong police officers in the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Meanwhile, the WikiLeaks technique of publishing secret tranches of documents descended into lechery. In 2014, hackers stole celebrities’ nude photos from iCloud accounts and published them in an event dubbed “The Fappening.” — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 491

Categorization

• CANDY: The Fappening as a named event — a fun, tweetable litany of internet activism’s own failures.
• XREF: connects to: Expert predictions about a new medium’s social uses are routinely wrong. — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 544; Disclosed company falsehoods destroyed the incinerator project’s credibility; Conspiracist propagators treat accuracy as irrelevant because crowdsourcing will reveal truth. — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 135 (+1 more)