Remember playing telephone as a kid? "She sells sea shells by the seashore" would morph into nonsense once it made it past just two or three kids.
Check out this cluster, compliments of Twitter. The 19-hour timeline is especially enlightening. Bloggers and journalists didn't bother to check facts, and a rumor spread like wildfire, mostly thanks to Twitter.
Here, media outlets from MSNBC to the New York Times pick up an AP story that was based on a Tweet that was based on a not exactly fact-based Variety story that involves Ashton Kutcher and--get this--Twitter's (alleged) plans for starting a TV show. Not until Jay Rosen of NYU thinks to go straight to the source does the truth come out.
Confession: MSN Entertainment ran the AP story in a prominent chunk of online real estate, next to a photo of Kutcher. I don't have the stats on how many readers clicked, but my conservative estimate is a million or more--before I spotted this story around 4:30 PST and had the editor yank the link.
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