The Sunil Tripathi affair was a sad sidebar to the April 15, 2013 terrorist attack on the Boston Marathon. Here it becomes a cautionary tale of the Internet from filmmaker Neal Broffman. Tripathi, a musically inclined Brown University student from an assimilated Indian-American Bryn Mawr household, disappeared in March of that year. Worried relatives utilized Facebook, YouTube, and other online resources in their frantic search. The digerati were supportive...initially. Then the deadly Boston Marathon bombs went off (detonated by two Islamic-militant Chechen brothers), and the still-missing Sunil somehow got labeled as a prime suspect. Web-based journalists (the site Reddit is especially criticized here) feverishly re-tweeted the unconfirmed rumors and misinformation, and Tripathi's already-desperate family found themselves vilified and threatened by cyberspace trolls in a cruel rush to judgment. That social media crawls with obscene bigots, bullies, and sociopaths is not exactly a revelation, but this film offers a moment-by-moment depiction of how "fake news" and high-tech lynching happens. Tripathi's fate is ultimately revealed in this tragic but instructive story that could not be more timely. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (C. Cassady)
Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi
(2015) 75 min. DVD: $50 ($125 w/PPR): public libraries; $295 w/PPR: colleges & universities. DRA. Collective Eye. Closed captioned. Volume 32, Issue 2
Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi
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