Should Reddit Be Blamed for the Spreading of a Smear?
On an overcast day in early May, I traveled to suburban Philadelphia to visit the family of Sunil Tripathi, the deceased 22-year-old Brown University student who, for about four hours on the morning of April 19, was mistakenly identified as Suspect No. 2 in the Boston Marathon bombings. The Tripathis had just arrived home after nearly two months spent in Providence, R.I., where they went to organize the search for Sunil, who disappeared on March 16. When I entered the house, Judy Tripathi, Sunil’s mother, asked me for a hug. In a shattered voice, she said, “I need hugs these days.” We sat at the kitchen table and talked, and at one point Judy handed me a photo of a young, smiling Sunil, caught in the motion of throwing a ball. “Look how happy he looks,” she said. For the next two hours, she and her husband, Akhil, and their daughter, Sangeeta, described what happened to them in the early-morning hours of April 19, and how the false identification of their son derailed their ongoing search for him and further traumatized their lives.
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The rest of it is here: Should Reddit Be Blamed for the Spreading of a Smear? It’s a chronicle of how bad information traveled quickly, a description of the harm it did, some background on the websites involved, and no prescription for the future.
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The general refrain from the journalists who helped propagate the misinformation went something like this: Breaking-news reporting has always been chaotic, and it’s more so now because the overall volume of misinformation, loosed by millions on Reddit and Twitter, has ballooned out of control. Andrew Kaczynski of BuzzFeed wrote a morning post-mortem on the site, along with a colleague, Rosie Gray, who had also tweeted about Sunil Tripathi. Neither mentioned their own involvement in spreading the wrong name, and Kaczynski has since deleted his incriminating tweets.
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“One thing we’ve been struck by is how porous the space is between social media, the media and law enforcement,” Sangeeta said. “We assumed that if random people on Twitter were sitting in their pajamas saying, ‘Here’s this kid missing in Providence that’s skinny, and here’s something horrible that happened because of a kid who’s skinny,’ that speculation would be contained within a certain space.”
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