A homepage editor for the Washington Post relays a crazy—and scary—tale of being caught up in a fast-moving case of mistaken identity online. As Doris Truong explains in the Post, it began when someone posted video of an Asian woman at the Rex Tillerson confirmation hearing on Wednesday and accused her of taking photos of the secretary of state nominee's notes. Somehow, someone then decided that the woman was Truong, who was not, in fact, even at the Tillerson hearing. Videos like this one falsely identifying her began to spread, and conservative sites were soon demanding to know why a Post editor was snooping on Tillerson. The well-trafficked Gateway Pundit picked it up, as did the Drudge Report, and even Sarah Palin tweeted about it with the word "Busted."
"I’m perplexed and, honestly, shocked by how quickly the narrative went from someone trying to identify a woman in a video to another person attaching a name to hordes seizing upon that information as the truth," writes Truong. She and the person in the video have just one thing in common: they're both Asian women, but that was apparently good enough for a positive ID. Who is the actual woman? That's still unknown. Was she actually taking photos of Tillerson's notes? Also unclear. Truong, who was personally bombarded with angry accusations online, writes that she's not going to disengage from social media over the incident. "But I hope the ridiculousness of what happened to me in less than 12 hours makes others think critically before sharing something that can be easily disproved." Click for her full post.