Rare News Desk
It was the sort of Twitter post for which a charged post-election moment, full of conspiracy theories and anxieties, was perfectly primed. Eric Tucker, founder of an Austin company called PocketMath, claimed that protesters who had gathered in Austin Wednesday night were “not as organic as they seem”; he presented photos of what he claimed were the buses that had transported them. The buses in the photo appeared to be in East Austin near downtown.
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By Friday morning, the tweet had been retweeted more than 15,000 times, picked up by Alex Jones’ InfoWars, Rush Limbaugh and newscasts. The problem: The speculation wasn’t true.
The buses had actually been hired by a company called Tableau to move more than 13,000 conference attendees around the city, the American-Statesman has confirmed.
“I can confirm that those were our buses,” said Keyana Corliss, a spokeswoman for Tableau Software. “They were transporting conference attendees to our ‘Data Night Out’ party. They were caught in traffic for about 15-20 minutes in the protest, but that’s it.”
Statesman reporters were also at the start of the rally on Wednesday at UT campus before it moved downtown.
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In an interview with the Statesman, Tucker, explained his thinking behind the tweet: “The way I see this election, it’s really been a circus anyways, and I don’t think either side has really been looking for the truth. This was my attempt to look for the truth.”
He was returning from a business meeting when he spotted the buses lined up in East Austin. He decided to snap a few pictures. A couple of hours later he saw news about the protests.
“I put two and two together,” said Tucker, who said he had voted for Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson. “I texted a couple of friends and thought, ‘What the heck, I’ll put this on twitter.’ I had no idea it would blow up to be this huge thing. I did not fact check it. It was not something I put a lot of thought into, not something I deeply deliberated.”
“I got it wrong,” he said.
Soon, it had been retweeted 500 times, including by someone associated with the Alex Jones show.
“I kind of assumed rightly or wrongly (the Alex Jones show) would factcheck that. No respectable journalist wouldn’t factcheck this,” he said.
Do you think Alex Jones is a respectable journalist? Tucker was asked in the interview.
“Ten years ago, I was definitely skeptical, but his organization has gotten significantly larger, and I have a certain amount of belief it’s gotten more professional,” he said.
Soon he saw a pile-up of vitriol in the retweets, including people calling for the slashing of the buses’ tires and for violence against the protesters.
“Truthfully, at the moment I wrote it, I was fairly convinced I was right,” said Tucker. “I believed what I wrote was right. I hadn’t factchecked it at all to the Nth degree.”
“It was not my intent to feed on the sensationalism,” he said.
He added: “I think that it is necessary for us to risk sometimes being wrong to help develop moving the dialogue forward.”
Friday morning, following a query posted on Twitter by a Statesman reporter, he seemed to back off the incendiary claim.
