TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Alexis Madrigal on the missing Sunil Tripathi being incorrectly named as the suspect for the Boston bombing:

The next step in this information flow is the trickiest one. Here’s what I know. At 2:42am, Greg Hughes, who had been following the Tripathi speculation, tweeted, “This is the Internet’s test of ‘be right, not first’ with the reporting of this story. So far, people are doing a great job. #Watertown” Then, at 2:43am, he tweeted, “BPD has identified the names: Suspect 1: Mike Mulugeta. Suspect 2: Sunil Tripathi.”

The only problem is that there is no mention of Sunil Tripathi in the audio preceding Hughes’ tweet. I’ve listened to it a dozen times and there’s nothing there even remotely resembling Tripathi’s name. I’ve embedded the audio from 2:35 to 2:45 am for your own inspection. Multiple groups of people have been crowdsourcing logs of the police scanner chatter and none of them have found a reference to Tripathi, either. It’s just not there.

The web is incredibly powerful and empowering. It can also be incredibly dangerous. Let this be a lesson to all of us (that we should have all learned after Wayne Chiang was falsely accused for the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007) what it can do when we spread information that isn’t verified: it could lead to innocent people being harmed.