Sunil Tripathi (or his parents) would do well to take legal action against Reddit for facilitating this garbage, if the final legal reports support the assessment that Sunil was not involved.
Should the family also take legal action against the ISPs of the Reddit users involved, simply for "facilitating" this garbage?
Edi: I wasn't accusing Reddit of libel. It's just a platform. The individuals who posted the comments would be the ones committing libel.
You have to remember the context: Some nearly anonymous asshole points a finger and says that so-and-so is the bomber, with no real concrete evidence. It's practically a farce at that stage, only idiots could fall for that.
Unfortunately for Sunil, there are a lot of idiots online (and in the media, apparently).
On the other hand, entities like the NY Post should have known better. They presumably pay "journalists" to fact-check (so there's a higher standard of quality expected), and they understand that it imparts a higher expectation on what they do print, which means it's more likely that people would believe such an accusation.
So Sunil might even have a case against professional outfits like these, especially since he wasn't previously a public figure. But against random people from the Internet there's not really any hope of a libel charge sticking.
Maybe some states would have "cyber-bullying" legislation that would apply though (assuming it's not struck down as unconstitutional).
It depends on the particulars of the accusation, but probably not.
Saying "I think you killed her" is a statement of opinion. If that is an opinion the speaker legitimately holds, then it would probably not be considered libel. Generally libel needs to be both false and malicious.
Proving malice is hard, so libel/slander is usually a difficult case to win. That's one of the things that makes it different than other venues, where intent (and sometimes even falsity) are not required.
Making that distinction may be hard for fossilized media and politicians, but it should come natural to anybody on HN.
The internet does not give you the right to spread untrue statements about people which you were negligent in discovering the truth of before repeating - such as that they committed a specific act of terrorism.
Too bad Reddit will surely be too busy not collecting such information just in case the evil government happens to ask for it, eh? You can never be too cautious about that government, you know.
I see a clear trend, on HN and elsewhere, of technologically clued-in people who simply do not share what we wrongfully assumed were common values amongst techies.
This includes the notion that services should be punished for things their users do, something that we used to attribute to people who simply didn't understand what something like Reddit is, or how the internet works.
I would suggest that assumption was based on underestimating how much of those values were not just informed by technological insight but Western cultural values, but I'm probably on thin ice there.
Any organisation, be a website, news organization, or Government, should be punished if it tolerates a Kangaroo court culture. Else we risk exposing just about any innocent person (us and our families included) to permanent damage.