Should Reddit Be Blamed for the Spreading of a Smear?

F.B.I. via Getty Images; Tripathi Family

When a picture of Sunil Tripathi (right) was posted on Reddit alongside an image of Suspect No. 2 in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings, it fueled speculation that they were the same person.

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.

At 5 p.m. on April 18, three days after the bombs went off at the marathon finish line, the F.B.I. released grainy photographs of two suspects. For the past month, the Tripathis had been renting a house and spending their days working with F.B.I. agents, Brown administrators and an organization dedicated to finding missing persons. Early on in the search, the family created a Facebook page called "Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi," which included video messages from family and friends and recent images of Sunil — walking the beach with his older brother, Ravi; attending his sister's graduation ceremony; posing with his mother at a Phillies game.

Minutes after the world first saw the suspects' photos, a user on Reddit, the online community that is also one of the largest Web sites in the world, posted side-by-side pictures comparing Sunil's facial features with the face that would later be identified as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The pictures were accompanied by speculation about the circumstances surrounding Sunil's disappearance and the F.B.I.'s involvement in his search. 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. As the minutes passed and the volume of threatening Facebook messages increased, the Tripathis finally called their F.B.I. contact in Providence, who assured them that nobody within his office believed that Sunil was Suspect No. 2.

The family had been told that missing people sometimes go to libraries or other places with free Internet service, where they type their own names into search engines to track their cases. The Facebook page was created with the hope that if Sunil searched for himself, he would find loving messages from his family and friends. Now they worried that he would see what was being written about him and take drastic measures to harm himself. Around 11 p.m., at roughly the same time that the news came out that Sean Collier, a 27-year-old police officer at M.I.T., had been shot and killed, the Tripathis closed the page so that no more messages could come in.

The removal of "Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi" was noted by several people in the media, including Sasha Stone, who runs an inside-Hollywood Web site called Awards Daily. 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. If the family had taken down the Facebook page, the reasoning went, it must mean that the Tripathis had seen their missing son in the grainy photos of Suspect No. 2.

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," shifted the now-fervid speculation to established fact: "BPD scanner has identified the names," Hughes tweeted. "Suspect 1: Mike Mulugeta Suspect 2: Sunil Tripathi." (Hughes has since all but disappeared from the Internet, and where he got this information is unclear.) 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. The next multiplier came from Andrew Kaczynski, a journalist at BuzzFeed, who sent out the police-scanner misinformation to his 81,000 followers and quickly followed up with: "Wow Reddit was right about the missing Brown student per the police scanner. Suspect identified as Sunil Tripathi."

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 31, 2013

An article on Sunday about a rumor that went viral in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing misstated the time that a reporter for BuzzFeed, Erik Malinowski, sent his first tweet about the takedown of the Facebook page dedicated to finding Sunil Tripathi, a missing student who was erroneously believed to be a suspect. It was sent at 3 a.m., not at midnight. (He was in the Pacific time zone when he sent it.) The article also misstated which of his tweets on the topic was retweeted by roughly 300 Twitter users. It was his second tweet, not his first. And the article misstated the number of Twitter followers of Andrew Kaczynski, another BuzzFeed journalist. At the time Kaczynski had 81,000 followers, not 90,000. (He now has 93,000 followers.)