12 Trial Lawyer • Summer 2023 Viewer comments streamed below the footage, complaining that drivers sometimes use weights to fool the autonomous system into thinking the driver’s hand was on the wheel, or claiming that manufacturers advertise that these systems work and can be relied on, so they should. Arguments raged between those who blamed the driver of the autonomous car and those who blamed the truck that sped by and changed lanes into its path. For the lawyers handling this case, or one like it, these posts can be invaluable. Dangers While most of our cases will not “go viral,” or organically generate enough interest to allow us to simply lurk on social media sites to learn what people think about them, we can generate that interest and interaction if we are creative in our use of these new tools. That said, there are significant risks that must be appreciated before venturing into this new area. An extreme example of a crowdsourcing danger is what happened following the Boston Marathon in 2013. As most everyone will remember, bombs were planted near the finish line of the marathon by two brothers. The bombs detonated, killing three and injuring hundreds. The day after the bombing, a Reddit user created a subreddit to collect information surrounding the bombing in an effort to identify the culprits. By the next day, over 3,000 people had joined the subreddit in order to crowdsource the investigation of the evidence. The day after that, the FBI released photographs of two suspects. Someone on the subreddit then identified a Brown University student who had been missing for about a month as one of the suspects. Identifying a suspect without evidence violated Reddit’s terms of service, but the moderators of the subreddit did not delete the post. The erroneous crowdsourcing then exploded. Others said the student looked like the man in the photo, mainstream news organizations picked up the story, and several tweets went out identifying the student as the prime suspect. None of this was correct. Soon after the FBI identified the suspects by name, the student was found dead from suicide. Prior to his death, the student’s family had been mercilessly harassed, and a virtual posse pursued him. Online vigilantism was born. Today, as soon as the details of a sensational crime are published, threads dedicated to following the incident sprout up all over social media. The Boston Marathon example is extreme, but a lawyer who causes an innocent person harm by negligently or recklessly accusing a person of wrongdoing or misidentifying them could be liable for defamation. Although it is probably far-fetched, attorneys should be careful to avoid any claim that they tampered with the jury pool through their use of social media. Though passive observation of posts that appear organically on social media should pose no danger whatsoever, when the lawyer creates social media posts there is a danger that they could go viral and be picked up by local media. A more realistic danger to worry about is over-reliance on the opinions and information contained in social media. When I was knocking on doors, talking to neighbors, or our investigator was interviewing witnesses identified in a police report, we were reasonably certain that we were contacting actual witnesses. When we took photographs of a scene or received photographs taken by law enforcement, we knew they were accurate depictions of what they purported to show. When purported eyewitness statements are culled from social media, an attorney cannot be certain that the person was even there, or that their statement is reliable. Crowdsourcing Continued from p 11
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTY1NDIzOQ==