How Social Media Smeared A Missing Student As A Terrorism Suspect : Code Switch : NPR - 2 views
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Tom McHale on 20 Apr 16"The city of Boston and the friends and family members of the marathon bombing victims will never forget the day when two explosions ripped through the crowd at the race, killing three people and injuring more than 200. Neither will the family of Sunil Tripathi, but for very different reasons. Their story is told in the documentary film Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi. Sunil was a gifted student from a high-achieving family. But in college at Brown University, Sunil began to struggle with depression. In March 2013, he went missing. His family organized a massive search operation, and - somewhat reluctantly - used social media to help with the search. "Despite how uncomfortable it was to take our personal childhood and smatter it across Facebook, we just knew this was what we had to do to get his story out," says Sangeeta. And then, the bombing happened. Three days after the bombing, the FBI released photos of the suspects. On Twitter, a former classmate of Sunil said she thought one of the suspects looked like him. That was picked up by reddit. And suddenly, the Tripathis' Facebook page was bombarded with hateful messages, many saying that, given his name and appearance, Sunil must be a Muslim terrorist. "This is not just one or two comments that would make Mom cry," says Ravi. "It progressed to having as many laptops open as possible and deleting every single post. It almost felt like a case study in mob mentality, in virtual mob mentality." Journalists saw the buzz on social media and started calling the Tripathis. Some retweeted the accusations. Others actually repeated them on television. The Tripathis, who had been waiting for their phones to ring with information about Sunil, were suddenly getting questions about his alleged involvement in the bombing. News vans lined up outside their home and reporters were knocking on their front door."