Why the Internet Failed in the Search for the Batman Shooter
By Will Oremus
Posted Friday, July 20, 2012, at 2:17 PM ET
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Google search for James Holmes Facebook profile
Web searches for clues to the Batman shooter's motivations led to cases of mistaken identity.
The Internet has trained us to assume that the intimate details of people’s lives must be out there on the Web somewhere, just waiting for us to enter the right Google search term or trawl the right social media platform.
News of the massacre at the Batman screening in Aurora, Colorado this morning sent a thousand journalists (and “citizen journalists”) to their browsers, racing to be the first to uncover the telling detail about the suspect. Would James Holmes turn out, like Tucson gunman Jared Lee Loughner, to have confessed in an online gaming forum to “hav(ing) aggression 24/7?” Might he have penned online political screeds, like Norway shooter Anders Behring Breivik?
Maybe. But if so, they weren’t forthcoming Friday morning. Mashable’s Lance Ulanoff writes of spending all morning scouring Facebook, Twitter, even MySpace for clues and coming up with absolutely nothing. “I cannot get over what an online ghost Holmes appears to be,” Ulanoff wrote.
At least Ulanoff came up with nothing. Others came up with something worse—misinformation and mistaken identity. “There is a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado, uh, page, ah, on the Colorado tea party site, talking about him joining the tea party last year,” ABC News’ Brian Ross excitedly informed milions of Good Morning America viewers Friday morning. Ross and the news organization apologized soon after, acknowledging that the report was incorrect.
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http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/07/20/james_holmes_facebook_mistaken_identity_why_social_media_won_t_tell_us_the_batman_shooter_s_motive.html
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