Twitter Spreads False Rumors

Many PC users love Twitter and use Twitter frequently, if not every day. This past Friday though, Twitter was in the news for not such a good reason – rumors were “re-tweeting” every second that Prop 8 (California’s ban on gay marriage) was overturned, yet the rumor was completely untrue.

According to the Moxie Mo Show, the LA Times accidentally tweeted Friday morning a tweet stating something about Prop 8 getting overturned and added a link. The problem is, the link to the LA Times article was an old news story which was published in 2008, thus causing the false rumor to begin spreading. The LA Times later put out another tweet explaining their error and apologized yet hundreds of thousands of Twitter people were already tweeting the false rumor. On Friday (May 15th, 2009), Prop 8 Overturned was the #1 trending topic on Twitter.

Prop 8 has not been overturned. As discussed in the above podcast, Twitter is great at disseminating information at the drop of a dime. Twitter can spread important news faster than CNN, MSNBC or even local news channels because of the amount of people who use Twitter. The issue, though, is what happens when that information is wrong/incorrect and yet people still spread rumors causing bad press for Twitter and the LA Times?