It has been more than 70 years since Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio broadcast caused hysteria for Americans who believed that the United States was being attacked by Martians. We've become a little bit more knowledgeable on how and where we get our news from today. Of course in Welles' 1938 radio broadcast, people swore America was being attacked by people from another planet and trusted their instinct and acted.
In 2011, Twitter has taken the place of radio for people finding out information that may or may not be true.
According to a recent article, two men were accused of being "Twitter Terrorists" because they posted tweets saying gunmen were attacking schools and kidnapping children. The event not only caused panic among parents but resulted in car accidents and numerous calls to emergency personnel.
The culprits, who say they got the information from other sources on the internet, could now face 30 years in prison for the offense.
Orson Welles never received a sentence for his radio broadcast so should these two individuals be punished? One would think that a majority of people would not believe postings by random people on Twitter.
A lesson learned here would be to choose legitimate sources for getting news.
With the popularity of Twitter and "citizen journalism" I think this will be a more commonly occurring problem in the future.
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