Boston Marathon Terror Attack - Part 3

So apparently some attention-starved jackass hacked the AP's twitter account to say that two bombs went off in the White House and Obama was injured, which caused the Dow to dip 140 points and then rebound when it was quickly revealed as a stupid hoax. I honestly don't understand the people who get off on that kinda crap.


At least we got a few good tweet reactions slamming it afterwards: http://www.heavy.com/news/2013/04/ap-twitter-hack-obama-injured-white-house-explosion/

 

AP Twitter hacked. This is why I keep all my passwords in a folder called "2012 New York Jets Highlights". Who would want to look at that?



Now I obviously don't know how the stock market works or what the Dow is, but its just ridiculous how people are so quick to freak out because of Twitter.

 

Well, to be fair, it's been a very messed up week and the Boston bombings (and the disrupted Al Qaeda train plot) has everyone on edge a bit. I found out about it after it was revealed to be a hack. But if I had seen the tweet come up on my feed, I might have believed it too or at least been nervous enough to search on the internet for confirmation or secondary sources. The guy who did this should be charged.

 

Even I lol'd as a Jets fan

 

Yeah, I definitely get that and would have probably reacted the same had I saw the tweet too. It's just that an incident like this speaks out to many of my reservations about social media in general, and how as is the case with most things in this world, it has good intentions but can easily be abused when used by the wrong hands. I feel like there is just too much dependency in things like this, and people never really seem to look for confirmation.

 

To use the old cliche, social media is a double-edged sword. I guess it's a force of good in some hands and a tool of evil (or at least misuse) in others. I still feel horrible for the family of that missing college student who was initially misidentified as the bomber. Going through the pain of having a missing son or brother is bad enough, but then for the whole internet to accuse him of being a murderous terrorist mastermind? That to me sums up the danger of sites like reddit, where everyone suddenly thinks they can be a super-sleuth with no regard for the consequences if they're wrong.

 

The moment the misinformation starts circulating, its time to call the authorities, report the accusations, and inform the authorities that they're (the accusations) false.

 

Why would you report misinformation to the source of the misinformation??? Oh you mean with the tweet... well maybe SOMETIMES there are other sources of misinformation but still...

 

Interesting first post.

I guess people come to the superhero forums to get in on the juicy terror attack/political talk they're so known for.

 

Right; the authorities, not the redditors, 9gaggers etc.

 

zing!

 

Anyone think the older brother ran out of cover and rushed the cops during that shootout to give his brother a chance to escape? Some spectator in a house got a few pictures of the shootout and it seems likely he knew they were ****ed if one didn't cause a diversion or something.







Also, I started remembering how amazed I was that the younger brother got away but read an account of the cops there saying that once they started throwing explosives at them they started distancing themselves and backing their cars away so that helps me understand it a little more.

 

Comedy Central, maybe?

 

That was my initial thought anyway, this just cements it for me.

 

You have brushes with the law every other week or so though, right? Yeah, I'm not familiar with criminal motives.

 

Not really lol. Just that it seemed likely that the older brother "sacrificed" himself to allow the other one to get away.

 

I don't believe he intended to be run over by his own brother... but yeah.

 

Well **** happens.

 

He's believed to have already been dead by the time he was run over.

 

Yeah, I asked the same thing here a few days ago because I thought that it was possible, but I didn't really think it was likely.

 

Cops say they tackled him when he ran out of ammo and as they were cuffing him on the ground his younger brother came rushing towards them in the car, running him over as the cops were able to get out of the way.

While I'm sure he was wounded already, the getting run over and dragged definitely killed him. He'd probably still be alive if it hadn't happened.

 

Meh. No loss. We only need one brother for answers. I'm quite content to see the other one have an almost comically undignified death.