Anatomy of a smear

By adamg on Mon, 07/29/2013 - 8:37am

The New York Times examines how Sunil Tripathi, that missing Brown student, briefly became Suspect #2 online.

Neighborhoods:

Boston

Topics:

Media

Free tagging:

Boston Marathon bombings

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Comments

Should Reddit be

By RedditorAnonymous on Mon, 07/29/2013 - 9:19am.

Should Reddit be blamed?

Short answer: yes

Longer answer: yes, they should SHARE the blame. The witchhunt was atrocious. Somebody at Reddit should have asked "proof?" before everybody blew up and started patting themselves on the back for making the *best* unfounded allegation. Some guy got a thousand upvotes for saying "WE DID IT GUYS!"

But the media F-ed up hardest. If somebody in the news had done their job and looked for official verification that Tripatha was involved, it never would have gotten anywhere; it could have just stayed a spurious internet rumor.

I keep reading this argument

By anon on Mon, 07/29/2013 - 9:57pm.

I keep reading this argument everywhere and it's ridiculous. Reddit is not a person, a committee, a publication, or an editorial entity. It's a community. It's like blaming Facebook or AT&T for something that happens in their network.

Also, plenty of non-stupids

By anon on Mon, 07/29/2013 - 9:59pm.

Also, plenty of non-stupids on reddit not only said "proof?" but also "shut up, that's insane."

Looking for someone to blame is pointless

By alkali on Mon, 07/29/2013 - 10:54am.

One of the many bad consequences of violent crime is that someone may be wrongfully accused of committing that crime. Here, law enforcement did a reasonable thing by publishing photos of the suspected bombers in order to seek the public's assistance in identifying them. Members of the public who saw the photos made a reasonable connection between those photos and a young man who (1) very much resembled one of the photos and (2) had recently disappeared from a New England college campus. That connection was worth investigating, but turned out to be mistaken. Of course, the cretins who called the young man's parents, posted horrid things on Facebook etc., ought to be ashamed of themselves: once the connection had been made, they should have left it to law enforcement to investigate. Other than that I'm not sure that this is anything other than one more unhappy consequence of the bombing.