Alexis C. Madrigal

Alexis C. Madrigal is an American journalist who was a staff writer and later deputy editor at The Atlantic, and who has written extensively about technology and the internet. In April 2013 he produced some of the defining contemporaneous journalism dissecting how Reddit and other online forums fuelled the misidentification of innocent people as suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing, including widely read pieces criticising the crowdsourced 'investigation' on Reddit and analysing what he called the anatomy of a misinformation disaster. His reporting documented in real time how amateur sleuthing on communities such as the short-lived r/findbostonbombers spread false accusations, a framing that became a standard reference in later journalistic and academic accounts of the harms of crowdsourced detective work. He has since co-hosted a public-radio program and continued writing on technology and society.