One of Durango’s newest residents played a unique role in Weinergate – the 2011 sexting scandal that brought down U.S. Congressman Anthony D. Weiner, who now is running for mayor of New York City.
Chris McCroskey is co-founder of www.TweetCongress.org, a nonpartisan website that tracks all tweets sent by members of Congress from their official Twitter accounts. He also owns IdeaLoop LLC, a software development company incorporated in Dallas.
In May 2011, news broke that Weiner used his Twitter account to send a lewd photo of himself to a 21-year-old college student in Seattle. In the days that followed, Weiner denied posting the image and claimed his Twitter account had been hacked. He said he could not say with “certitude” whether the photo was of him.
A reporter with The Daily, an iPad-only newspaper at the time, contacted McCroskey and asked if he could provide additional data related to Weiner’s tweets.
McCroskey was able to provide the tweets that had been deleted, the time of the tweets, the location of the tweets, the application used to send the tweets and the geolocation of the tweets.
“With the metadata, we could show that Congressman Weiner wasn’t exactly telling the truth about the tweets, about being hacked,” McCroskey said.
McCroskey was able to show that the sexually illicit tweet had a similar stamp to Weiner’s more official tweets – they were sent from the same place, same application and same IP address.
McCroskey also provided the metadata to The New York Times so that two publications would have the information, and his website wouldn’t be seen as being partisan. The Times didn’t do anything with the information, but the Daily did, he said.
“When it came out, it was the nail in the coffin,” McCroskey said. “It was the evidence that he was lying about being hacked – that he had actually sent the tweets. He came out the next day, held a press conference and admitted to it.”
Weiner resigned about two weeks later.
McCroskey, who was a political science major at the University of Arkansas, said he created TweetCongress as a side project to give the public a one-stop location to follow messages sent by their representatives.
Twitter can be an effective tool for public officials to communicate with their constituents, he said. They easily can share what they did during the day, who they met with and how they are working for the people, he said.
“It really is a beautiful communications platform for a democratic republic like ours, where you can hear from the people and get instant feedback,” McCroskey said.
“Anthony Weiner probably was one of the best communicators via Twitter in Congress. He just overcommunicated a little bit, if you know what I mean,” McCroskey said.
In the days after the scandal, congressional members sent 28 percent fewer tweets, he said.
It is common for Twitter users to “follow” other Twitter users. Some members of Congress “unfollowed” people who may have had questionable characteristics – for example, if someone showed too much cleavage in a portfolio photo, McCroskey said.
“We saw a huge scrubbing after Weinergate,” he said.
McCroskey said he moved to Durango in April to escape the summer heat in Dallas, where he lived for 12 years. He and his wife, Erin, and four children visited Durango last year and “fell in love with the weather,” he said.
IdeaLoop’s two owners now both live in Colorado, with its 20 employees scattered across the country.
McCroskey downplayed his role in the scandal. He provided the data used to expose Weiner’s lie, he said, but otherwise, his involvement was minimal.
His website, www.TweetCongress.com (which had operating problems as of last week), catalogues tweets sent by congressmen – something Congress should be doing but isn’t, he said.
“All I was is the guy who was watching,” McCroskey said. “And we were watching inadvertently because we were doing the right thing for the people.
“These are official tweets, and they should be governed by the Freedom of Information Act, and they should be cataloguing all these things, and they’re not,” he said.
shane@durangoherald.com
