• Greg Ferenstein at TechCrunch argues that I'm wrong in saying that public shame is as far as punishment should go for Tripathi. Instead, he argues that such speech should be illegal, because while other comments can moderate speech in normal times, at exceptional moments there somehow isn't time to understand that Tripathi wasn't being truthful:

  The case against public shaming is that, during a crisis, Twitter isn’t a magical marketplace of ideas, where citizens are given sufficient time to weigh competing claims and come to a reasonable conclusion. Adrenalin is pumping, there’s not enough time for credible sources to sniff out the truth, and people get hurt.

  To which I can only respond: who got hurt because of his tweets? The answer is no one. No one was busting out of their safe apartment to rush dangerously down to the NYSE to see the (non-)flooded floor. Yet, because of populist anger, it appears that at least one NY politician is pushing to press charges. I think this is bogus, and any smart prosecutor will note that the chances of success are slim at best.
  
  
• Moving on, Mathew Ingram at GigaOm raises a different question: whether it was even appropriate to out Tripathi. He fears that the backlash against Tripathi could go overboard and "community action against an anonymous troll" could all too easily turn into "a lynch mob." In some ways, this is the opposite argument of Ferensteins. Both are basically asking: "but what if this leads to harm?" They may be valid questions to ponder -- and we've certainly worried about the possibility of "lynch mobs" doing damage based on bad information. But I'm not convinced that should ever lead to the legal silencing of speech.
  
  Not surprisingly, there are a lot of emotionally driven opinions on all this -- in fact GigaOm had such a vociferous internal debate among writers/editors at the site that they published the internal discussion publicly.
  
  
• However, I think the most important and insightful piece on this entire story comes from Heidi Moore at the Guardian who put the whole story in perspective by making a few key points that were missed by almost everyone arguing about the story.
  1. If you looked at Tripathi's other tweets, it became really obvious really quickly that he was posting crap/jokes -- mostly for the semi-amusement of his few thousand followers. For example he fake retweeted a bogus tweet from Goldman Sachs saying: "In a city underwater, the vampire squid is king" and similarly fake retweeted Barack Obama's account saying that NYC residents should eat their dogs if they run out of food. These aren't particularly funny, but it sort of puts in context the kinds of tweets he was posting, such that you could see how his followers would mostly know that he was just tweeting stupid stuff not to be taken seriously.
  2. Given that, the real problem here was not with Tripathi acting like a jackass clown, but with professional journalists and organizations -- including the National Weather Service and CNN -- who retweeted his other bogus tweets, lending them a veneer of truthfulness where none existed.
  3. Moore also points out that this is nothing like a "fire in a theater" situation because there is no harm. Hell, as she points out, there is no "theater" where the fire is supposedly being claimed here:

     For one thing, where was the theater? People in New York were largely trapped at home. Were they really going to run screaming into the streets, unable to handle the idea of the New York Stock Exchange being flooded? Were emergency responders going to stop answering calls to ferry over to the Stock Exchange to prevent water damage to the floors? Would people turn off their generators, hoping to save power for the day when stocks could be traded again? No, no and no.
     
     As one fund manager at a $6bn hedge fund concisely put it on Twitter: "Is it really the end of the world if the floor floods? This is just getting stupid."

  4. She notes that if anyone should be called out here, it should be the journalists who repeated the tweets without any sort of confirmation. To those who say that it was in the heat of the moment, even that is questionable. Sure, there was as rush for journalists to be the first to retweet some news, but that's an issue for the journalists to deal with. Most people were just hunkered down dealing with the storm, not rushing off to deal with any of this. And if those journalists had done even the slightest research, they would have realized the tweets were bogus -- either by looking at his full feed, or even looking at how others had responded to his tweets. Moore makes a strong case:

     Here's the thing: while what Tripathi did was stupid, inappropriate, ill-timed and loathsome, the reaction to it was entirely out of scale to the actual offense. The truth is, Tripathi had a relatively small niche on Twitter. His influence would have been limited had not journalists on Twitter been desperate for information to share, regardless of provenance.

     He was not the person who affixed those headlines atop legitimate news sources: journalists, who should have checked their sources and did not, used their power of the press to popularize the claim and bring it into people's homes. The decision to publish Tripathi's information was made by journalists, even when his persona and the nature of the information called for skepticism.

     In fact, the first responses to his tweet on the NYSE, from non-journalists, were as follows: "That's bullshit"; "What are the sources for your links?"; "confirmed by whom?" and "you are a liar."

When we scan reviews online, we aren't looking for gothchas--outlandish, one-off tales of awful experiences. Instead, we look for patterns. We make judgments based on the themes that emerge from many reviews, not from the crazy charges that appear in one or two. As such, there's an obvious way for businesses to improve their online standings. Rather than trying to suppress a few negative reviews, they ought to work like mad to offer the kind of service that inspires a whole bunch of positive reviews.

In a July 29,2005 email about competing video websites, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen wrote to YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, "steal it!", and Chad Hurley responded: "hmm, steal the movies?"

SUBJECT: Re:http://www.filecabi.net/

Jul 29, 2005 1:05 AM, Steve Chen wrote:

steal it!

Jul 29, 2005 1 :25 AM, Chad Hurley wrote:

hmm, steal the movies?

Jul 29, 2005 1 :33 AM, Steve Chen wrote:

haha ya.

or something.

just something to watch out for. check out their alexa ranking.

-s

Jul 29, 2005 7:45 AM, Chad Hurley wrote:

hmm, i know they are getting a lot of traffic… but it’s because they are a stupidvideos.com-type of site. they might make enough money to pay hosing bills, but sites like this and big-boys.com will never go public. I would really like to build something more valuable and more useful. actually build something that people will talk about and changes the way people use video on the internet.

Jul 29 2005 6:51 AM, Steve Chen wrote:

right, i understand those goals but, at the same time, we have to keep in mind that we need to attract traffic. how much traffic will we get from the personal videos? remember, the only reason why our traffic surged was due to a video of this type. i’m not really disagreeing with you but i also think we shouldn’t be so high & mighty and think we’re better than these guys. viral videos will tend to be THOSE type of videos.
-s

Jul 29 2005 6:56 AM, Steve Chen Wrote:

another thing. still a fundamental difference between us and most of those other sites. we do have a community and it’s ALL user generated content.

-s

"The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them." -- Thomas Jefferson

I think there are a couple of lessons to be learned from this. First, as Mike has said before, good content is often less important than useful services like organizing and filtering information. The Post had the content Karp wanted -- an up-to-date blog and links to useful resources -- but because its website was poorly organized, he wasn't able to find it easily. Some newspapers claim that Google lives parasitically off of other content producers, but I think this is a good illustration of why that's not true; there was plenty of content out there, but without Google, Karp might not have been able to find it. The other problem is that for all of the Post's progress it still seems to regard itself largely as a newspaper that happens to publish its articles on the web, rather than a general media company that happens to publish a paper edition. Sometimes a traditional newspaper article is the best way to cover a story, but often (as in this case) it's not. The Post, like a lot newspaper outlets, still seems to put too much emphasis on its print content, even in circumstances were a shorter, timelier, and more densely-linked story would be more useful to readers.