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Supporters hang an American flag in a tree across the street from St. Josephs Church before the start of the funeral for bombing victim Krystle Campbell in Medford, Mass. /April 22, 2013)

Armed with little more than grainy surveillance camera videos, cellphone photos and live tweets from police scanners, they have flooded the Web with clues, tips and speculation about what happened in Boston and who might have been behind it.

People in the moment want to participate. They want to be a part of whats going on, said Nicco Mele, an expert on technology and social media at Harvards John F. Kennedy School of Government.

And most ... take your pick, hilarious or ironic ... of all is how many of the posts right here on this board are perfect examples of exactly what this article is about!!!

Some amateur sleuths focused their suspicions on Sunil Tripathi, a Brown University student Social Media Boston bombings Social media spirals out of controlwho has been missing since last month. Using an animation tool, they used an image of Tripathi to highlight similarities between his ce and the FBI photos of one of the Boston bombing suspects.

We have known unequivocally all along that neither individual suspected as responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings was Sunil, Tripathis mily said in a statement on Friday.

Tsarnaev attended mosque at Islamic Society of Boston(ISB)in Cambridge. The construction of their cultural center in Roxbury in 2004 was marked by a controversial government subsidy from City of Boston.

I beg to differ.. I know their was a lot conspiracy theoriest comments but at the end of the the social media was able to capture these criminals much quicker than normal.

LOLOLOL!!!!

But beyond the photos they upload, their speculation and theorizing dont necessarily lead to a more efficient resolution.

But this watershed moment for social media quickly spiraled out of control. Legions of Web sleuths cast suspicion on at least four innocent people, spread innumerable bad tips and heightened the sense of panic and paranoia.

GOVERNMENT-SUBSIDIZED MOSQUE THAT BOMBERS ATTENDED CLOSES INDEFINITELY

However, Tripathi has no apparent connection to the marathon bombing. That was underscored Friday, when authorities revealed the identities of their suspects, two ethnic-Chechen immigrant brothers Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev of Cambridge, Mass.

Even as first responders were struggling to tend to the needs of the three killed and more than 170 injured in the Boston Marathon blasts, Web forums were cranking out rumors that there had been four bombs instead of two, Social Media, that an area library had been targeted and that the death count was well over a dozen.

In a mad rush to be the first to identify the perpetrators, anonymous posters online began openly naming people they believed had planted the bombs. Caught up in the mania, some traditional media ran with that information. Thursdays New York Post cover showed a photo of two men at the marathon under the headline Bag Men and implied that the two were prime suspects. In ct, neither was a suspect and one of the men, Salah Barhoun, was a high school student from outside Boston and had nothing to do with the explosions.

ISB has raised concerns for its ties to radical figures in the Muslim world. Islamic cleric Yusuf Abdullah al-Qaradawi, who said in a 1995 speech that Islam would conquer America and conquer Europe, appeared on IRS forms as one of the ISBs trustees.

In short order,new york escort forums like Reddit and 4chan were alive with speculation based on little or no evidence that the culprits were Muslim fundamentalists or perhaps right-wing extremists.

Their speculation was not limited to the events in Boston. The unusual confluence of tragic and suspicious events in the past week led many online to suggest that the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas, might have been a terrorist attack as well and that the ricin-laced letters mailed to politicians could have come from those behind the marathon bombing.

Suspected Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev attended a Massachusetts mosque that made a controversial deal with a Boston city agency that allowed it to buy land at a lower-than-market price despite the mosques links to some radical anti-American figures

The Cambridge-based mosque and satellite center announced its INDEFINITE CLOSING Friday.

Advocates of social media and crowd-sourcing have long touted its unrivaled power to gather huge amounts of information quickly in crisis situations. With tens of thousands of people on hand at the marathon, most armed with smartphones, the sheer volume of data available for analysis proved too tempting to ignore.

I feel like weve reached a certain threshold here the Internet is finally outstripping cable news completely, a poster using the handle PantsGrenades wrote on Reddit. In ct, I wonder if were inadvertently doing their work for them.

This is one of the most alarming social media events of our time, said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia. Were really good at uploading images and unleashing amateurs, but were not good with the social norms that would protect the innocent.

ISB trustee Walid Fitaihi, who wrote that Jews would be punished for their oppression, murder and rape of the worshippers of Allah, helped BROKER the ISBs deal with the Boston Redevelopment Authority.

According to Murray Jennex, a crisis management expert at San Diego State University, the huge influx of online voices enabled by social media can be extremely helpful because eye witnesses are holding cameras in almost every location.

Funeral for Krystle Campbell

So as the Boston Police Department engaged in a gunfight with the two brothers in Watertown, Mass., early Friday, tens of thousands of Web denizens tuned in to live streams of police scanners, furiously tapping notes and ideas into Reddit and Twitter.

Once the FBI released images of the actual suspects, things really got out of hand. Online gumshoes scoured the Web for ces that might match and illustrated their work with drawings, circles and other home-brewed CSI techniques.

There is zero, none, nada, zilch control available to anyone in positions of authority in social media. In ct, it exists at least in part to provide a cathartic outlet for the fevered imaginings of social misfits, thus giving them a steam pop-off safety valve so they dont vent those delusions in more dangerous/destructive ways.

Mondays bombings, the first major terrorist attack on American soil in the age of smartphones, Twitter and Facebook, provided an opportunity for everyone to get involved. Within seconds of the first explosion, the Internet was alive with the collective ideas and reactions of the masses.