Is @comfortablysmug the biggest Internet troll of all time? — Amy Z. Quinn (@AmyZQuinn) October 30, 2012
Jeff John Roberts looks into the potential illegality of spreading false information on Twitter:
[T]he government already regulates rumors related to the SEC and the stock market, and courts say they will draw a line at protecting speech that gives rise to “imminent lawless action.” Should there be limits on social network speech in emergencies too? At GigaOM, we’re fond of highlighting Twitter’s role as a source of freedom and public media tool. For now, my instinct is to leave Twitter alone. But future emergencies may test that position.
Shashank “@comfortablysmug” Tripathi has since apologized and resigned from the campaign of a New York congressional candidate. But at least one NYC official is trying to get him prosecuted. Laura Miller zooms out:
[Perhaps] what Shashank Tripathi and other fake-news purveyors intended to do [was simply] to issue dispatches no one was supposed to believe in the first place. But one rushed or irony-impaired retweeter is all it takes to seize on a bogus photo or news item and credulously pass it on. The context gets lost, and each retweeter presumes that the message comes with the considered endorsement of the person they got it from. At the same time, real people go on posting real dispatches (written and photographic) from places where real disaster has struck, dispatches we’d never get from the professional media.
The result is a crazy quilt of the true, the manipulated truth, the false, the truthy (false things that feel true), the flagrantly false (fakes so fake they shed meaningful light on the other fakes) and dozens of permutations in between.
The Dish 