Editorial: For threats, Reddit useful for more than memes

For the past few weeks, Pitt has served as a useful experiment in the power of decentralized… For the past few weeks, Pitt has served as a useful experiment in the power of decentralized information sources.

Aside from ENS texts, a few scattered press releases from public officials and reporting from local — and now national — press sources, we find ourselves reliant primarily on informal Internet communities for information. This new, unorganized system has proved surprisingly robust, given the circumstances.

Reddit, Facebook and Twitter now often inform us about building evacuations before the ENS text system. Apparently, the lag time required for central authorities to send notices out in batches is longer than the time required for a social-media user to start complaining about another building being evacuated. And in the cases when information about evacuations is wrong, or when somebody deliberately tries to distort the flow of information on the Internet, errors are often corrected within minutes.

More surprisingly, the Internet is not only spreading information, but also analyzing it, often improving the situation on the ground for students. Stopthepittbombthreats.blogspot.com, a website begun in the past few weeks to aggregate observations and patterns related to the bomb threats, has proven to be immensely popular and useful, collecting more than 350,000 page views since its launch. The creator, who apparently has some intelligence background, has been offering the campus a comprehensive analytical summary with each round of threats, providing a more complete analysis than any other single site.

The discussion moves beyond the creator’s opinions, however, with other users commenting and providing additional insight into the day’s events. As on any website, there are many comments of questionable value, to say the least, but the aggregate effect of discussion has been positive, with members of the community able to try and discern some truths about these events. At the very least, it offers the community a collective outlet for our frustrations.

And while we would have expected some informal support group to start on Facebook, few would have anticipated the creation of several couch-surfing websites to connect displaced dorm residents with students who reside off-campus. Not only does this demonstrate a high level of good-heartedness and philanthropy, but also a remarkable capability for high-level organization without a central agency controlling information.

There are, of course, drawbacks to this new world of information. On Monday night, a specific blog post by a Reddit user quickly jumped in popularity, and the accompanying link to a conspiratorial blog made the rounds on social-networking sites. Similarly rumorous tweets and Facebook posts have experienced bursts in popularity over the course of the last week. In more than one case, the unverifiable information quickly sent many students into confusion and fear — an unavoidable drawback of unedited information that reminds us that the democratic nature of the Internet doesn’t always produce instant accuracy.

Moving forward, we feel it is best to remain cautious when spreading what are possibly false rumors. Also, as has been pointed out by users on these sites, it is possible the person or people responsible for the threats to read the online stream of information, and this should not be forgotten.

Yet all told, the impact of these new information sources has been — some would say surprisingly — positive. We’ve been discovering information faster and more comprehensively than we would have otherwise. Traditional news sources and University authorities have responsibilities and restrictions that prevent them from serving such a function on the campus. We can be happy and comforted that, during these times, there is a community online serving a very useful function within the University discourse.