Boston and Watertown are essentially on lockdown this morning as FBI and police continue the “massive manhunt” to locate suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings.  During the early hours of Friday morning, one of the suspects – Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26 – was killed during a firefight with police. The second suspect, Tsarnaev's brother Dzhokhar, apparently escaped the shootout and is still at large in the Boston area.

With public transportation suspended and schools closed, Boston area residents are basically on lockdown, and many are turning to Twitter and other social networks to reach out to family and friends. One Twitter user posted this photo of a message left by local police, advising residents to stay inside with their doors locked. Others posted about the mayhem they were seeing around them, with the hashtag #scared even trending in Boston this morning.

But with so many bits of information being publicly blasted out to the world in real time — photos, first-hand accounts, rumors, or just downright false information — has social media done more harm than good for authorities this morning? A Twitter account being attributed to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been widely circulated by news reporters, although metadata has since revealed the account to be fake (a profile on VK, the Russian equivalent to Facebook, however, does seem to be legitimate). Reddit in particular has become a source of major interest and scrutiny over the past 12 hours, mainly due to the fact that mainstream media is latching onto false information posted on the site and reporting it as fact:

[Reddit] quickly launched the subsection labeled “/FindBostonBombers,” rifling through potential suspects, casting many now-proven-innocent bystanders as suspicious simply because they happen to have been in photos at the scene of the explosion. The site's work was latched onto by many in the mainstream media, which ran many of its own now-discredited reports and photos; In particular, CNN reported on arrests that didn't happen and suspects that were deemed innocent, and the NY Post ran a now very-maligned front page photo of two dark skinned men and implied that they were suspects.

Ground rules have since been set on Reddit to control the false information coming in, and put a stop to trolls deliberately causing confusion. Stay tuned.