18 Feb Not dead yet! Who started the Lightfoot hoax?
So who is to blame for the so-called “Twitter hoax” about Gordon Lightfoot death?
CanWest is reporting a Twitter hoax is to blame:
“Bernie Fiedler, Mr. Lightfoot’s concert promoter, told the National Post that a rumour about the singer’s death was started by “someone in Ottawa” and posted on Twitter.”
Yet, Toronto news channel CP24 claims CanWest’s David Akin was at fault. And, anyone watching on Twitter saw CanWest publish and retract the story all within an hour.
As the first word of Lightfoot’ “passing” came it was all going down it seemed fishy. So, I jumped onto Twitter search and called up the earliest reference to Lightfoot’s passing.
It looks as if Lightfoot’s manager could be right. A single tweet came before all the others – and might have set off this mess. I tracked down the tweet in question. And, it wasn’t David Akin or CanWest. But, it was repeated very quickly by them. Here is the image above of the tweet is from an account @fleminski – an account which no longer exists (the time stamp in the image says 1hour ago, as the tweet was one hour old when I captured the image). A well-known Ottawa tweeter @zchamu called it out very, very quickly. And the folks at Roots Music Canada tried valiantly to stop the impending carnage:
(see: http://twitter.com/rootsmusicanada/status/9297134904)
Now, somehow Ronnie Hawkin’s got mixed up into all of this. Perhaps he is even the real “very start” of this whole mess. CanWest’s Akin quickly outed him has the source of the rumor. More to come as no doubt Akin will blog about this.
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Research shows Twitter’s value in questioning rumors « The Buttry Diary (August 19th, 2010 at 6:11pm)
[...] of that is the false report of Gordon Lightfoot’s death. Yes, it spread on Twitter. But it started by word of mouth, where rumors have been circulating since humans first mastered speech. And its big spread came [...]
Ian, you deserve a medal for doing what I was just thinking about. Brilliant documenting. Well done. Buy you a drink tonight.
Cached twitter page for fleminski: http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:sGLgqOO9VmwJ:twitter.com/fleminski+fleminski+twitter&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca&client=firefox-a
Here’s the cached page for @fleminski
http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:sGLgqOO9VmwJ:twitter.com/fleminski+%40FLEMINSKI&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca&client=firefox-a
Thanks for this excellent post. Roots Music Canada actually replied even sooner but had to delete the first tweet because we’d misspelled Mr. Lightfoot’s last name in the tweet; hence it wasn’t getting picked up in searches.
regardless of it starting as a TWEET there should have been a call to LIGHTFOOT/his management instead of relying on TWITTER or Ronnie Hawkins..
Amazing that a simple phone call to Lightfoot/Management/Bernie Fiedler, wasn’t made BEFORE putting such erroneous info out into the public .
I called just after 2 and was told all was ok. I’m not even a reporter! ROOTS Canada did the same thing and got the truth!
Good gawd..I can’t imagine how any of his children felt hearing such horrid news on the radio or reading it online.
All of Gord’s fans are ecstatic that he is okay and gearing up for his tour once again.
alo – interesting that Kathy Smith is in the name on the first TWEET. ‘get kathy smith’
She was an old g.f. of Lightfoot and the one who did jail time regarding the death of John Belushi…
Please note that @Fleminski is NOT the source of the Gordon Lightfoot rumour. She is a dear friend of ours and was herself the victim of an apparent hoax – she was just the first to tweet about it but did so IN GOOD faith on what she thought was reliable information.
You MUST read zchamu (Tweet #2 above) setting the record straight on this http://www.threeseven.ca/2010/02/gordon-lightfoot-is-not-dead-heres-what.html
I didn’t start it either. I had been reading about the apparent death of GL on Facebook discussions. So I tweeted my local media buddies to find out if it was a rumour. Note- I suggested it might by a ‘rumour.’ And NO I’m not Cathy Smith who was GL old girlfriend….
Within hours we figured out what happened. Someone called RH and according to RH – Wanda Hawkins apparently sent out emails etc to her list. I saw it on Facebook discussions.
It went to Twitter from there….