ComfortablySmug

ComfortablySmug (aka Shashank Tripathi) was a 29 year-old man working in finance. Smug, as he was known, gained 6,500 followers over the past few years as an intelligent, self-aware internet troll.

During the Hurricane Sandy storm, he used his Twitter account to falsely report that the New York Stock Exchange was flooded. A bunch of gullible media reporters immediately began to retweet this, in such a rush to break potential news that they didn't even bother to verify it.

Rather than laud him as the hero he is, exposing corrupt principles in the media, Jack Stuef of Buzzfeed decided to dox him and make him the bad guy.

Some principled reporters (like the kind who check their facts and don't retweet whatever gossip they come across) like Heidi Moore of TheGuardian, pointed out the bad logic behind vilifying him instead of criticizing the reporters who were fooled.

As a result of his doxing, Smug chose to resign from his IRL job to save his employer the anguish of being associated with him, even though he didn't do anything wrong and his account was clearly an anonymous trolling account and not a news account.

Links

• His Twitter
• Dox on Tumblr
• Jack Stuef post
• October 30th: Buzzfeed Politics
• October 31st 8:11 PM GMT: Heidi Moore article

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