Boston Bombing Facebook Post About Drones Goes Viral in Pakistan

Last Friday, Micah Daigle, a Rhode Island native who now lives and works in San Francisco, was (like the rest of America) glued to the TV set and internet for news about the manhunt for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in Watertown, MA.

Daigle was, of course, relieved when he heard the news that Tsarnaev had been captured. But he was also frustrated.

And so he crafted the Facebook post you see here as a kind of thought experiment. What would be the reaction, Daigle wondered, if drones had been used in Watertown?

“Through all that week when this was happening in Boston, I saw that people were empathizing very deeply with people in Boston who were the victims of these attacks, but not really thinking day to day about the kind of terror that we perpetrate on these other countries,”
Daigle told me.

At first, the post was just shared among Daigle’s friends. But then, it went viral. Many Pakistanis, who live under the daily threat of drone strikes, picked up on it and started commenting. And before the trolls got to it, there was some interesting back and forth between American and Pakistani commenters.

For more of The World’s extensive coverage of drones, click here.