Sunil Tripathi, a missing student, was wrongly accused by Reddit of being the Boston Marathon bomber in 2013. Redditors misidentified him, leading to widespread harassment of his grieving family. Weeks later, his body was found in a river; he had died by suicide.
I feel like internet detectives get a lot of shit wrong.
Yeah, some love their witchhunts
Court of Public Opinion.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Sunil_Tripathi
Echo chamber heroes
That’s just sad. Stupid people
When reddit tries to be 4chan
“We did it!”
Typical Redditors.
>One day after the bombings, Reddit users created a subreddit named r/findbostonbombers with the intention of consolidating the information surrounding the events of the bombings in an attempt to identify the culprits of the attack. By Wednesday, April 17, over 3,000 people had joined the subreddit in order to crowdsource the investigation of the evidence. At 5:00Â p.m. on April 18, the Federal Bureau of Investigation published photos of the suspects believed to be involved in the bombings. Soon after, another Redditor named Sunil as a plausible suspect after asserting a resemblance between the suspects in the FBI’s pictures and Sunil, who had gone missing a month before the bombings. Although this behavior violated the subreddit’s rule that prohibited naming suspects without evidence, the moderators did not delete the post. To further the speculation behind Tripathi, a woman claiming to be his classmate tweeted that she too thought Tripathi resembled a suspect in the FBI’s photographs.
>Soon after the release of the photos, people began trying to contact the Tripathi family, through phone calls on ABC News, as well as angry messages on Tripathi’s Facebook page, dedicated to finding Sunil. At 11Â p.m. on the same day, the real bombing suspects (Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev) shot and killed a police officer of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Police Department. The following day at 2:45Â a.m., a redditor reposted a tweet by twitter user “Greg Hughes”: “BPD has identified the names: Suspect 1: Mike Mulugeta. Suspect 2: Sunil Tripathi. This caught the mainstream media’s attention after BuzzFeed reporter Andrew Kaczynski shared a tweet that named Sunil as the primary suspect from his personal Twitter account. According to the BBC, Tripathi had soon become the “standout suspect” on social media before the FBI identified the real suspects to be the Tsarnaev brothers. Sunil was found dead on April 23. Mulugeta was an unrelated person whose last name was spelled out in the Boston Police scanner that night, and whose first name was never confirmed to be “Mike.” Tripathi’s name was never mentioned in the scanner.
And this is why echo chambers are so dangerous.
The digital lynchmob
I believe in Karma.
Richard Jewell has entered the chat.
I’m sure those redditers justified it to themselves,
We did it, Reddit!!!
Dumbasses, this is what happens when you’re in an echo chamber and refuse to believe or even admit you’re wrong.
Here’s proof that sometimes words cause more suffering than weapons
What did the family do?
That doesn’t sound at all like you idiots. 😀
Every time I start to think that reddit is a superior option to other social media, I remember this guy and check myself. Reddit is social media and can be just as toxic and terrible as X and the others.
Redditards strike again…What else can you expect from a platform where reason goes to die?
Reddit hive mind? Noooooo
r/redditmoment
Fuck Reddit
He died before the bombings even happened. Not trying to validate reddits actions, but his death had nothing to do with the event
reddit is a a total fucking cess pit and youll never cange my mind.
Damn… poor kid. Reddit is a dark place.
Sites like these really bring out the mob instinct in people.
Another classic Reddit moment. Prime example of pack mentality and people lighting torches with little to no factual information just speculation.
The pain of losing a loved one is unimaginable, but the added trauma of public harassment makes it even worse. This is a devastating reminder of the harm that can come from misinformation. Rest in peace, Sunil.
There is a special place in hell for these kind of people.
The reddit hivemind is definitely not as smart as it thinks it is