When online sleuths jump to conclusions to find a villain, they sometimes create a new victim instead
An FBI image of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects. Photo: Handout/FBI via Getty Images Last week, Peter Weinberg spent a night alone in his Bethesda, Maryland, home refreshing Twitter and “watching helplessly as people tried to destroy his life.” The 49-year-old finance marketing executive had earlier in the day been misidentified as the aggressive cyclist who was caught on video assaulting kids on a bike trail as they posted flyers in support of George Floyd.
“What started off as people saying ‘This image and your brother look the same,’ became ‘This image is your brother,’ became ‘How are you providing a cover for your brother to do this?’” Tripathi’s sister said in a documentary produced a couple years later. A day after the FBI photos were released, Tsarnaev was arrested. And four days after that, Tripathi’s body was found in the Providence River. He is believed to have killed himself, likely well before the marathon even took place.
Charlottesville car attack After Alex Fields Jr. drove his Dodge Charger into a crowd of counterprotesters at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville three years ago, right-wing websites quickly tried to cast blame on someone else. The now-shuttered GotNews.com was the first to run with the story identifying Joel Vangheluwe as the driver, referring to him as an “Anti-Trump, Open Borders Druggie.
Michael Brown shooting It took almost a week for police in Ferguson, Missouri, to identify the officer who shot Michael Brown in the summer of 2014. In the meantime, Anonymous went to work. Days before Darren Wilson was named as Brown’s killer, the loose-knit hacker collective said Bryan Willman was the officer in question. But Willman was a Missouri police dispatcher, not an officer, and the evidence Anonymous used to identify him was incredibly thin.
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