CBS

The rolling waves of online misinformation and paranoia in the immediate aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing were swift-moving and powerful; for the family of Sunil Tripathi, a Brown University student who went missing a month prior to the attacks, they compounded a tragedy. Rumors spread that Tripathi was involved with the bombing during the short window before the real suspects were identified, fueled in no small part by the zeal of a small group of users on Reddit. He was, in fact, deceased. This was a story I covered closely; I spoke with one of the moderators of the forum as the story was unfolding. Later, the creator of the primary manhunt subreddit told me that the entire operation was "not even slightly" worth it. Reddit's general manager added that the site's staff "deeply regret" how events unfolded during those first days. The question of Reddit's liability in this situation was broached but never fully examined. For one, the target of the attacks was no longer alive. And the section of the site where users posted their theories — /r/findbostonbombers — was swiftly removed, along with its users' postings. Attention moved on to the real manhunt. But this left a slew of unasked and therefore unanswered questions: To what extent, if a wrongfully accused subject wanted to file a lawsuit, would Reddit be legally responsible for its users' actions in a situation like this? What if paid Reddit staff were involved in the creation or propagation of such comments? What if an automated user — a bot — had participated, as is common (as a joke) on Reddit? What if a Reddit staffer had participated in the creation of that bot? These lines of questioning, unbelievably, were central to the Nov. 24 episode of The Good Wife ("Whack-a-Mole"), a CBS drama that is now in its fifth season and remains a critical darling. The show, a legal procedural, has been recognized for its savvy handling of technology before. But this episode wasn't just ripped from the headlines — it was something else. It was, for lack of a better term, an act of journalism.

CBS The show's fictional Scabbit power user, LotionMyFeet, explaining how Karma works.

"We read probably all the primary articles on what happened with Reddit and the Boston bomber," said Robert King, who created The Good Wife with his wife, writing partner Michelle King. He credits one writer in particular, Nichelle Tramble Spellman, the writer of the episode, for diving deep on the subject. "We start with the idea — if there was a lawsuit involved, what would be interesting about this?" he said. "We put ourselves in the fictional place of seeing what this guy's life would be like if he was [living and] on the Reddit site." The path they took — spoilers ahead, if you haven't yet seen the episode — was to assign liability to the show's fictional Reddit stand-in, Scabbit, for deploying a bot that created automatic responses to threads based on others users' responses. "It's a computerized version of the worst part of human nature," says Alicia Florick (Julianna Margulies), the show's central character and lead litigator in this episode's case. The bot had repeated accusations made about an innocent man staying near the site of a fictionalized bombing, and resulted in harassment and loss of work.

CBS