Tweeting fake news in a crisis – illegal or just immoral?

Shashank Tripathia, a hedge fund analyst, began issuing false and alarming news reports on Twitter at the height of Sandy.

As hospitals lost power and a major power station exploded, Tripathia contributed to the chaos by falsely claiming that all of Manhattan had gone black and that the New York Stock Exchange trading floor was under three feet of water. The tweet was finally refuted by the stock exchange, but not before it had been repeated hundreds of times, including on CNN and the Weather Channel. In short, Tripathia used a media platform at the height of an emergency to promote panic and anxiety. Everyone agrees that his behavior was reprehensible. But there is also the question of whether tweets like Tripathia’s are (or should be) illegal.