Shashank Tripathi, Last Night’s Twitter Villain @ComfortablySmug

By Jack Stuef

This post is now available on BuzzFeed FWD, which was down for a time due to Sandy.

During the storm last night, user @comfortablysmug was the source of a load of frightening but false information about conditions in New York City that spread wildly on Twitter and onto news broadcasts before ConEd, the MTA, and Wall Street sources had to take time out of the crisis situation to refute them.

What leads a person to do such a thing, which his critics have likened to shouting “fire” in a crowded movie theater? It’s unclear. But perhaps it has something to do with the nature of anonymity. If there are no consequences for posting false “BREAKING” news, there’s an incentive to do it to an accumulate a large audience.

What @comfortablysmug didn’t count on, apparently, was losing that anonymity. Based on photos he censored and posted to the account but I found unedited elsewhere, @comfortablysmug is Shashank Tripathi, a hedge-fund analyst and the campaign manager of Christopher R. Wight, this year’s Republican candidate for the U.S. House from New York’s 12th congressional district.

FEC documents show Wight has paid Tripathi thousands of dollars this election cycle as a “consultant.” @comfortablysmug has been a vocal supporter of Mitt Romney and posted tweets suggesting he attended this year’s Republican convention. He’s listed here by a local Republican group coordinating volunteers for a Romney phone bank. He’s 29 years old.

For years, he’s been a prolific commenter at NYmag.com and a popular conservative presence on Twitter. In 2008, he penned an entry for the site’s popular sex diary feature that “detailed a week of obsession, rough sex, and Ambien.”

A year later, they interviewed him. Tripathi, appearing with the same censored face that shows up in Twitter photos, said he was “not as blatantly an asshole in person” but still has “asshole tendencies.” He credits Adderall with his skill at writing so many provocative comments.

When I called Tripathi and introduced myself, he immediately hung up.  @comfortablysmug did not respond to a DM request for comment. Wight could not immediately be reached for comment. Jordan Terry, founder of hedge fund consultancy Stone Street Partners, whose blog @comfortablysmug links to in his Twitter profile, said “Smug” no longer writes for the blog, but Terry had “otherwise no comment” on Tripathi.

Since the controversy last night, @comfortablysmug has not tweeted.

Lots of Siri jokes yesterday, as the service offered useless and even absurd weather information during Sandy. But this request today, from Zach Seward, raises a good point: A simple call-and-response service like Siri ought to be emergency-oriented, or at least competent in navigating situations like this. A moment of confusion about who to call or what to search for during a crisis is precisely when someone might expect a voice request to work. My iPhone chimed with periodic warnings last night and, even if my carrier had gone down, would have been able to connect to other networks for emergency services — this is actually a required feature in American phones. It was a good device to have around. But Apple’s beta-test voice toy, which masquerades as a core device service, would have been useless. 
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Lots of Siri jokes yesterday, as the service offered useless and even absurd weather information during Sandy. But this request today, from Zach Seward, raises a good point: A simple call-and-response service like Siri ought to be emergency-oriented, or at least competent in navigating situations like this.

A moment of confusion about who to call or what to search for during a crisis is precisely when someone might expect a voice request to work. My iPhone chimed with periodic warnings last night and, even if my carrier had gone down, would have been able to connect to other networks for emergency services — this is actually a required feature in American phones. It was a good device to have around.

But Apple’s beta-test voice toy, which masquerades as a core device service, would have been useless. 

Twitter Is A Truth Machine

By John Herrman

(This full post is now available on BuzzFeed, which was down for a time during the storm.)

There was no shark in Brigantine, and certainly no beached seal in Manhattan. The NYSE trading floor did not flood, and the 10 or more Con Edison workers trapped at a damaged plant turned out not to exist. These rumors were briefly and embarrassingly juxtaposed in users’ Twitter timelines with real and often devastating stories about lives and property that had been destroyed, people in need of help, and a city’s infrastructure buckling under the weight of a historic storm.

But more important, perhaps, we already know they’re false. 

Twitter’s capacity to spread false information is more than canceled out by its savage self-correction. In response to thousands of retweets of erroneous Weather Channel and CNN reports that the New York Stock Exchange had been flooded with “three feet” of water, Twitter users, some reporters and many not, were relentless: photos of the outside of the building, flood-free, were posted. Knowledgeable parties weighed in. 

The micro-controversy drew to a close with a screenshot of a webcam inside the dry building, posted on Instagram and tweeted by what seemed like half of my timeline. Within a couple hours of the rumor’s birth, the NYSE Twitter account re-confirmed its death. The zeal with which people posted and reposted the correction seemed almost demented next to newer, more frightening news. But it was, in its own way, reassuring.

Twitter beckons us to join every compressed news cycle, to confront every rumor or falsehood, and to see everything. This is what makes the service so maddening during the meta-obsessed election season, where the stakes are unclear and the consequences abstract. And it’s also what makes is so valuable during fast-moving, decidedly real disasters. Twitter is a fact-processing machine on a grand scale, propagating then destroying rumors at a neck-snapping pace. To dwell on the obnoxiousness of the noise is to miss the result: That we end up with more facts, sooner, with less ambiguity.

Initial misinformation has consequences, and a consensus correction on Twitter won’t stop any number of these rumors from going viral on Facebook. There, your claims are checked by your friends; on Twitter, if they spread, they’re open to direct scrutiny from people who might actually know the truth.

But even this process is dramatically condensed. The first draft of the popular history of 9/11 was written on live television by a group of exhausted, horrified and often isolated TV reporters. Misstatements, confusion, and some of the messier stages of live reporting, filtered across the country by phone, email and word of mouth without context. Much of the raw materiel of the “9/11 truth” movement is rooted in sloppy early news reports. Some of most insidious myths about Hurricane Katrina were seeded the same way. (It’s worth noting that tonight’s Con Ed rumor was effectively started on Reuters and ended with a tweet.)

The old adage, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes” should probably be abandoned along with other dated bits of wisdom — “Never argue with someone who buys ink by the barrel.”

Because the internet today, as exasperating as it can be, is very good at one thing: vetting ascertainable facts.

BuzzFeed is temporarily offline, so for the time being we live on Tumblr. 

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