Why Patrick Swayze's Twitter 'death' happened
Patrick Swayze's 'death' this week shows the dangers of taking the online micro-blogging site Twitter too seriously as a reliable source of news.
The controversy arose when Florida radio station Kiss FM posted a message saying the Point Break star had died.
As usually happens on Twitter the message was picked up and 'retweeted' by users everywhere - meaning what was an error of judgement by one quick fingered radio station news person, soon became common knowledge.
It was made all the more plausible by the fact that Swayze, pictured with Keanu Reeves in the surfing epic, is widely known to be suffering from pancreatic cancer at the moment.
In some ways Twitter is the ultimate version of Chinese whispers, and because in most cases it is just normal people using the service privately, rather than authoritative news organisations, no checks are made whatsoever before 'news' is passed on.
And the lesson is...be careful where you get your 'news' from.
Follow me on Twitter for updates at: http://twitter.com/BenHurst
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Ben Hurst
Personally , I never believe a word I read in the Birmingham Mail.
i love that comment.....too right this paper is full of rubbishy journalists who do not bother to find the facts so therefore make them up!!!!
Thanks for the helpful comments, Cotton Eyes Joes, you bunch of redneck inbreds. I'll have you know I haven't made up any stories for the last ten minutes at least.
And there you go again making assumptions, that I, we are inbreds. I suppose in that 10 minutes there was a toilet break. Oops suppose i'm making assumptions now, well I have no respect for journos, especially the ones with poor english grammar, that use the sameword three times in one sentence or that start a sentence with Because.... Please feel free to pull my english grammar apart but then again i don't write tripe for a newspaper.....