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.

Not everything wrong should be banned

I unfriended somebody on Facebook the other day. It’s something I’ve only ever done once before, as “friends” lists are just a representation of a network graph, not a way to describe the relative strength of each relationship. But in this case, I have never even met the person and had no mutual friends, and although he did nothing directly against me, I decided I couldn’t see a good reason to retain a connection to him.

What prompted this decision? It was something you could see as a very small thing. I saw in his news feed that he had joined a group calling for Islam4UK to be banned from marching through Wootton Bassett. I fully agree he has the right to not want it to happen. The entire idea of a terrorist front staging a media stunt in what has become a shrine to the fallen must surely be highly offensive to any decent human being, whatever their views on the conflicts.