Sunil Tripathi, a Brown University undergraduate student, had gone missing on March 16, 2013, having suspended his studies due to bouts of depression.

Tripathi's family turned to social media to assist in their search for him, uploading a video to YouTube and setting up a Facebook page.

[10] The following day at 2:45 a.m., a redditor reposted a tweet by twitter user "Greg Hughes": "BPD has identified the names: Suspect 1: Mike Mulugeta.

"[11] This caught the mainstream media's attention after BuzzFeed reporter Andrew Kaczynski shared a tweet that named Sunil as the primary suspect from his personal Twitter account.

[15] Posting on Facebook, Tripathi's family described the tremendous amount of attention the misidentification had caused as painful, but they sought to use the negative publicity of the case to assist in their search by raising awareness.

Although the name was changed, the creator of the show researched what happened to Tripathi and based the episode around the legal ramifications that social media sites potentially face as a result of false information being disseminated.

[20] In "Boston", the season 3 premiere of the HBO series, The Newsroom (first aired on November 9, 2014), the editorial staff discuss the misidentification of Tripathi.

The story is told through interviews with the Tripathi family, friends, journalists, and former Reddit general manager Erik Martin.