Every Friday after our lecture I devote some time to catch up on the latest news via Twitter. Usually there isn’t anything exciting, but today something strange happened. My feed started growing. I thought, OK, it could just be people tweeting on their lunch break.
But then it kept growing and soon enough it revealed some shocking news – ‘RIP Eddie Murphy’.
My heart sank as I started having flashbacks of his movies Coming to America and Dr Doolittle. The news was sad, I was in shock. But then more tweets started appearing, ‘Eddie Murphy is NOT dead’.
‘Well, is the guy dead or alive?’ After doing some searching I uncovered that Murphy was in fact alive. He had been the victim of yet another social media fuelled death rumour.
You see, it only takes one person to tweet something false for another person to re-tweet that information and just like that, you’ve killed Eddie Murphy (online). It’s a dangerous game.
It’s the same with blogging. What about those annoying emails forwarded to you by that politically outspoken friend saying how much more money refugees get then our aged pensioners. A lot of the information is false and yet they still dish it out without any punishment for spreading what can only be labelled as lies.
Don’t get me wrong, Twitter and blogs have a real purpose in terms of instantaneous reporting, but there aren’t enough checks and balances in place. These ‘trolls’ who sit behind an online alias aren’t accountable and are literally getting away with what I’d like to call ‘online murder’.
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