Should Reddit Be Blamed for the Spreading of a Smear? - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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By 8 p.m., three hours after the F.B.I. released the suspects’ photos, angry messages began to appear on the Tripathi’s Facebook page, and at 8:15 Ravi received a phone call from a reporter at ABC News in New York, who asked if Sunil had been spotted in Boston and if Ravi had seen the F.B.I. photos of Suspect No. 2. Ravi, unclear at what she was getting at, told her there had been no word from Sunil.
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P Yim on 11 Dec 133 hours for information to spread
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The Facebook page was created with the hope that if Sunil searched for himself, he would find loving messages from his family and friends.
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At 10:56 p.m., Stone tweeted: “I’m sure by now the @fbipressoffice is looking into this dude” and included a link to the Facebook page. Seven minutes later, she tweeted: “Seconds after I sent that tweet the page is gone off of Facebook. If you can cache it . . .” Several journalists began tweeting out guarded thoughts about Sunil’s involvement.
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At 2:43 a.m., a Twitter user named Greg Hughes (@ghughesca), who was previously tweeting things like, “In 2013, all you need [is] a connection to the Boston police scanner and a Twitter feed to know what’s up. We don’t even need TV anymore,”
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Seven minutes later, Kevin Galliford, a journalist for a TV station in Hartford, relayed the same information to his own followers; Galliford’s tweet was retweeted more than 1,000 times in a matter of minutes.
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Andrew Kaczynski, a journalist at BuzzFeed, who sent out the police-scanner misinformation to his 81,000 followers
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@YourAnonNews, a Twitter news feed connected to the hacker collective Anonymous, tweeted out Tripathi’s name to the hundreds of thousands of people
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Roughly 300 Twitter users retweeted Malinowski’s second post on the subject, including the pop-culture blogger Perez Hilton, who sent Sunil Tripathi’s name out to more than six million followers.
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Reddit enjoyed record-breaking traffic numbers during the Boston coverage, and the company has always considered itself “content agnostic,” meaning that as long as what’s being posted is legal, Reddit will not intervene and take it down.
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@YourAnonNews is very likely to surpass the Twitter following of most major American newspapers. The account is followed by hundreds of journalists, myself included. For those who dream of a post-Snowden utopia where no government and corporate secrets are protected, @YourAnonNews is one of the only trustworthy news sources out there.
