News travels fast, nonsense travels faster

“RIP Johnny Depp” is currently a trending topic on Twitter. I’m pretty certain that, were he dead, the BBC would have picked up on it. I’ll be perfectly happy to admit I’m wrong if I am (after all, people do die unexpectedly), but I’m going to guess that somebody has produced some misinformation, and thousands of sheep have believed it without question and passed it on. People do that. But what’s interesting about it happening on the Twittervine is that news agencies are starting to rely on social networks to give them the heads up on what they should be reporting. People are going to start gaming this. It’ll be interesting to see what rumours get started in the election run-up.

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