While there's a sliver of an outside chance that this person may have had something to do with the crime, those playing along are better off following the leads of the authorities. Meanwhile, Twitter was momentarily captivated by a person on a roof, a detail in one of the photos that circulated after the explosions. "People are critical of what other people post." In the past, keen-eyed Redditors have called out such hoaxes as the Puerto Rican street sharks and explained why such viral images were fake. "The community is generally good at sifting out ," Lee says. people asking further questions," he said.Īnd as the images and information poured in, the crowds on Reddit began parsing the data. Redditors began posting even before the second explosion went off, Matt Lee, the main moderator of r/Boston, told NBC News. The picture was taken from a video in a convenience store in. "You can enter these attributes, and builds a visual model of the target and then scans for the pattern," Lorenzo Torresani, assistant professor at the Vision Learning Group at Dartmouth, told NBC News.Īs the FBI and Boston police continue to collect eyewitness photos and video from tipsters, armchair investigators across the Web are starting their own searches. WATCH: Boston police have released a new photo of the surviving marathon bombing suspect. While being interviewed by Cambridge Police Department (Cambridge PD), the victim relayed that his captors may have been involved with the Boston Marathon. Once the police figure out what "suspicious behavior" looks like, they can enlist the help of computers to scan images and videos for certain descriptors, such as "brown hair" or "yellow jacket" or "caucasian." So where do they start when dealing with a photo and video evidence bin this big? And what, if anything, will the Internet's "crowds" - like those now currently surfacing their own bombing images on Reddit - add to the investigation? If even a fraction of eyewitnesses sent in a few photos or their own Zapruder-style video, investigators stand to receive a deluge of digital files. This is going to take hundreds and hundreds of man hours."
Most crucially, "a lot of what shows up on these photos and videos won't seem relevant until they get additional information from someone else. Martin Richard, one of the young victims of the Boston Marathon bombing, whose family lives five blocks from Frank Armstrong the cop who guarded his body.