Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Crime… : DASH Story 2014-11-29
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This particular article was used by a now-defunct poster on the news aggregation website "Reddit" to justify racist viewpoints in the wake of the riots in Ferguson, Missouri on Monday, November 24, 2014. Information from this article was selectively picked and disseminated by the poster to express a number of views that were a direct contradiction to the actual conclusions of the article itself.
Another poster read this article in its entirety and found that the poster was selectively choosing data that fit their argument, while ignoring the rest of the data and its conclusions. The second poster confronted the first poster with the findings and actual information, and the first poster deleted his arguments from Reddit in response.
As a function of Reddit, users are up or down-voted based upon the written responses they make in a given forum thread. The defunct poster was successful in convincing more than 400 users to up-vote racist content and false data, before the second poster was able to read the Harvard article and disprove his theory. Due to the popularity of Reddit, it is conceivable that the defunct poster would have become even more popular and spread disinformation across the internet, and people would not even have thought to check on the veracity of the article before accepting it as truthful.
As of this email, the second poster has more than 3,500 up-votes with their analysis of the defunct-poster, complete with citations depicting the study's actual conclusions.
None of this would have been possible had Harvard not allowed open access to the article in question. I thank the DASH program for allowing such access to the public, and encourage them to do so with as many academic articles as possible in the future.
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