With powerful new social media platforms like Twitter, whispers about inaccuracies are often magnified into shouts. Flickr/mkhmarketing. Some rights reserved.
NBC’s Brian Williams came under fire on social media, ironically for an account in which he “misremembered" literally being under fire during a 2003 helicopter ride in Iraq. This falsified account has led to a six-month suspension without pay for Williams–a fall he’s unlikely to fully recover from.
While the US military-focused newspaper Stars and Stripes first reported the story, social media played an essential role in magnifying its reach. The article’s author, Travis J. Tritter, tweeted his article, which was subsequently retweeted 75 times and freshly tweeted out by other news outlets, turning a story normally accessed by the paper’s typical 600,000 online daily visitors into a viral story that swiftly forced the NBC network to take action against its star anchor.
