Love it or loath it we are now in a digital world.
Where once we checked the sky for rain, we now tap on our android weather apps and the scratching hiss of vinyl has been replaced by the spinning download button on iTunes.
Prior to World War One those of us with the most to say had a soapbox to address the crowd. Stumpy wooden crates gave speakers an extra few feet off the ground to project their views on politics, religion and ‘the end is nigh’ predictions to entertained passersby.
If people disagreed with the views emitting from the soapbox, well, that’s what you kept your rotten vegetables for.
Many a broadcaster had their political opinions cut short by a well aimed projectile cabbage.
But with the rise of the internet we now have virtual soapboxes in the form of Twitter, Youtube and online forums. The internet has provided the largest soapbox of them all, where one person can now address more than a handful of locals on the street – they now have millions of potential ears and minds to influence.
But what happens now when we disagree with that person? Where do we fling our cabbages? And what happens when that person’s comments go further that what society deems as right? What happens, in short, when things go wrong?
Earlier this year, on April 15, things went wrong.
The world watched that afternoon as reports flooded in of a bomb attack at the Boston Marathon. It witnessed the grim sight of the wounded, the fear in the faces of the survivors and the determination of the forces in the manhunt which followed.
And then the world became involved.
Messages of support and comfort for the victims lit up the Twitter streams, along with updates from the ground on what was happening. But amidst the words of hope for the recovery of the survivors, a name cropped up too, a name of a suspect – Sunil Tripathi.
In a matter of minutes the manhunt became a witch-hunt.
The 22-year-old philosophy student, chess player and saxophonist had gone missing just over a month earlier. His family had already taken to the internet to raise the search for him, appealing for help on social media and YouTube, posting videos urging the young man to come home.
Three days after the Boston Marathon bombings though, at 3am in the morning, the family started receiving phone calls. It wasn’t their missing son.
Between 3am and 4.30am, they received 72 phone calls from media and social media asking for comment on his potential involvement in the case. The Facebook page set up by Mr Tripathi’s family in an attempt to help find him became frozen due to the amount of abuse from online users posting on the page.
Within the internet forum Reddit a witch-hunt had sprung up in Sunil Tripathi’s name, claiming that he was responsible for the Boston bombings and demands were made to find him.
But not one of the online users had checked their sources. No one had checked the facts. It was rumour and the rumour was wrong.
The abuse that the family suffered despite the innocence of their son only abated some time on the following morning, when NBC reporter Pete Williams said on Twitter that Sunil Tripathi was not the man wanted by police. A few days later, Reddit issued a public apology admitting that it had helped to fuel “online witch-hunts”. By then, however, the damage to Sunil’s family was done.
The body of Sunil Tripathi would be found just over a week later and returned to his family – not as a terrorist but as their son. Innocent until proven guilty.
In a world full of shades of grey it would seem inappropriate to police it with uncompromising black and white rules. Deciding who says what and when online runs the risk of stifling the freedom of the people who use it.
As one Beijing University student was once quoted as saying in a CPJ Briefing: “The atmosphere on the Internet is far more free than the atmosphere in our country generally. When you are in front of a computer no one can control your soul or your spirit.”
The internet is, after all, a tool. It’s the user who decides whether or not that tool becomes a weapon. Would we ban kitchen knives from being produced in an effort to reduce violence?
In the case of Sunil Tripathi, however, it may be wise for those who occupy the online world to remember that freedom comes with a price and often a higher sense of responsibility.
In newsrooms across Europe and the West journalists are trained to check sources and check them again. They sit through hours of media law lectures, ethics discussions and production values learning how to not just tell a story well – but above all tell a story right.
And when they fail, which they sometimes do, they are held accountable by the public and by the law.
The internet does not differ hugely from a newspaper or television station – it is still a publishing platform and it is still a soapbox. It is also still subject to the same rules and law which drive society and freedom itself; free speech, defamation, libel, innocent until proven guilty.
It was the French philosopher Voltaire, whose works Sunil Tripathi would have studied, who said: “I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it”.
All we can do in this digital world is tread carefully and above all accurately in the hope that the price of online freedom doesn’t reach a human cost too high to pay.
Laura Piper 