Twitter as a News Source. The next War of the Worlds?

On October 30th, 1938, the United States experienced mass hysteria--most pronounced on the east coast in New York and New Jersey--in response to a radio broadcast put on by Orson Welles and his Mercury Theater On The Air. The public reaction has prompted decades of research into mass hysteria, been used as a model by the military around the world to design information warfare against enemy troops and civilian populace, and used as the most compelling reason to protect the public from the knowledge of the presence of aliens on Earth.

I'm surrounded by TV news broadcasts from various networks daily,  yet I just found out on Twitter that there was a shooting at the Empire State Building ten minutes before it made national news on a single channel of network news.

How fast information can spread on a single source like Twitter just blows my mind.   But it also concerns me.   How many times now have we seen a claim that a Hacktivist group takes credit for a breech, or a virus was or was not created by the same author and instantly spread globally across the internet at light speeds.

You have to wonder about the validity of information an how it Trends on the Internet.  Would it be possible to incite a global panic based on a single "tweet"?    

You know they say History repreats itself......




-RazorEQX




References:
http://www.war-of-the-worlds.org/Radio/