By now, everyone should know that just because something is on Twitter doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true. Nevertheless, when Canada’s Globe and Mail saw a tweet this afternoon from a real-looking* news account that indiscreet former CIA director and NSA chief Michael Hayden was killed in the LAX shooting by a “radical Christian group,” it immediately ran with it.
Had it taken just one second to investigate the insane-sounding death of a major public figure, the Globe and Mail would have noticed that the seemingly legitimate account was clearly fake — it had just one tweet at the time. (It now has a second tweet about 9/11 or something.) But it didn’t. It didn’t have one second to spare.
* Although the account’s Twitter icon is currently a photo of a donkey and its handle is “Broken News,” it used to look exactly like the real Breaking News account.
