Newspaper Falls for Hoax Tweet, Kills Off Former CIA Director Michael Hayden

By now, everyone should know that just because something is on Twitter doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true. Nevertheless, when Canada’s Globe and Mail saw a tweet this afternoon from a real-looking* news account that indiscreet former CIA director and NSA chief Michael Hayden was killed in the LAX shooting by a “radical Christian group,” it immediately ran with it

Had it taken just one second to investigate the insane-sounding death of a major public figure, the Globe and Mail would have noticed that the seemingly legitimate account was clearly fake — it had just one tweet at the time. (It now has a second tweet about 9/11 or something.) But it didn’t. It didn’t have one second to spare. 

* Although the account’s Twitter icon is currently a photo of a donkey and its handle is “Broken News,” it used to look exactly like the real Breaking News account. 

Michael Hayden Briefly Killed by Fake Tweet