Is Twitter (sometimes) that 12 year old gossip girl? Nah.

Okay, well not Twitter – but it’s users. Of which, I am a proud one (@mjoza).  <– selfless promotional pitch there.

So, just a warning this post is more of a rant. If you’d like something more intelligent and scholarly I’d suggest turning on BBC news or NPR right about… now.

So I came home from work today (fairly standard day; nothing major to report) and logged onto Twitter. To my horror I saw “Zach Braff” was a trending topic. Now, for those of you watch trending Twitter topics it could mean only one of two things – he’s dead or he got into a fight with Kayne West.

Today, users reported he was “dead.”

Now, I’m one of those people that think he’s a genius. I love Garden State and Scrubs – he’s a brilliant dude who has a knack for making the normal doldrums of one’s life interesting, tv-show-worthy and hilarious.

So, to see that people were saying he “died” I nearly fell out of my chair. Until I started reading…

Reading….that there was a fake CNN page published and Zach is perfectly alive and kicking. I breathed a sign of relief as I bit into my mushroom ravioli and texas toast dinner.

So, who’s to blame here? No one, absolutely no one.

Twitter has become a new syndication service and it’s done something that news stations have struggled to do for years – deliver news online in real time. Yes, of course you can log onto CNN.com or news.yahoo.com and find out exactly what is happening throughout the day; and now-a-days you can even Google a football game and find the score instantly.

Now is Twitter a 12 year old gossip girl? Of course not. It’s human nature, people share information and people believe each other without fact checking.

Just because it’s trending doesn’t make it true – fact check as you would when someone brings up a half-truth at the office.

By the way, Twitter; thanks for making search real time. I appreciate it!