It took a 29-year-old hedge fund analyst and political operative with a sick compulsion for inciting panic to expose the dark side of Twitter earlier this week.
Using his widely followed account @ComfortablySmug, the New Yorker posted false updates on Monday claiming disastrous scenarios during already-disastrous Hurricane Sandy. He preyed on fear and caused people to waste precious time refuting his lies. Among his hoaxes: that the New York Stock Exchange had flooded, Governor Cuomo was trapped, and that Con Edison would shut off all power in Manhattan. He sprinkled truth amid fiction, lending credence to his con. Some of the ploys received more than 600 retweets.
Every number I called for Shashank Tripathi appeared to have been disconnected yesterday. He issued a public apology only after being outed by the web site Buzzfeed on Tuesday, and resigned his job as manager of a GOP congressional campaign.
It seems as if Tripathi falsely yelled "fire" in a virtual crowded theater. But the metaphor used by the late Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes as the classic example of unprotected speech is not an accurate reflection of what's punishable today.
"It's a very handy metaphor, but it doesn't represent the state of the law today," said Jeff Hermes, director of the Digital Media Law Project at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
For @ComfortablySmug to face charges, he would have had to incite lawless activity, such as a riot. There are enough unenforceable laws on the books anyway. But as the ultimate in crowd-sourced information, Twitter failed to self-correct for the truth.
"So many people who are respected kept re-tweeting him," said Jim Manley, the former aide to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy and a relative newcomer to Twitter, who called out Tripathi. "I'm still trying to figure out how to deal with it."
Manley was trying to decide whether to "unfollow" those who retweeted the falsehoods without checking the source. It's simply not enough that we all include in our profiles the disclaimer that retweets aren't endorsements. That's not gonna fly when a similar con artist finally incites that riot.
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