How an Online Mob Doxxed an Innocent Man

“An innocent man faced a torrent of online threats and abuse after being mistakenly identified in a viral video in which an angry cyclist hurt a child,” reports the BBC: Mr. Weinberg was falsely identified when the wrong date was attached to the initial appeal made by the police in Bethesda, U.S. Mr. Weinberg used the popular fitness tracking app Strava, which showed him as having been on the Maryland bike trail on that day. However on the correct date he was working at home… Once his address had been shared by others — a practice known as doxxing — the police had to patrol the area for his safety, reported New York magazine… Mr. Weinberg has since received dozens of apologies from people who abused him online. Weinberg mistakenly thought his app only shared his bike-ride routes with his network of friends, New York Magazine reports. They add that Weinberg also discovered tweets wrongly accusing another man — a former police officer in Maryland — which had been retweeted and liked more than half a million times. And that the woman who’d posted Weinberg’s home address later “deleted it and posted an apology, writing that in all of her eagerness to see justice served, she was swept up in the mob that so gleefully shared misinformation, depriving someone of their own right to justice. “Her correction was shared by fewer than a dozen people.”