D1

By Jake Coyle
The Associated Press

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NEW YORK - Cassy Hayes and Jasmine Coleman were among the first fans to arrive outside the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles where Michael Jackson was brought and later pronounced dead.

How had Hayes and Coleman heard the news so quickly?

Twitter.

The two young women had learned about Jackson's health like so many who get their news nowadays: by reading the ever-flowing feed of real-time information on the microblogging service.

Jackson's unexpected death at 50 was just the latest major news event where Twitter played a central role. But just as quickly as Twitter has emerged as a news source, so, too, has its susceptibility to false rumours become abundantly apparent.

But truthfulness remains the biggest problem: Those direct, near-instantaneous dispatches are far less reliable than old-fashioned journalism. News that circulates on Twitter, re-tweeted from person to person, can spread quickly - often too quickly for it to be verified. False rumours spread daily on Twitter.

In the days following Jackson's death, fake reports have frequently had to be knocked down by news organizations that do the fact checking. Dawson notes that established media channels still have a virtual monopoly on credibility.

Erroneous declarations of celebrity deaths have been one trend.

Patrick Swayze, who is battling pancreatic cancer, recently had to defend that he is indeed still alive after thousands of Twitter users spread the news that he was dead.

Jeff Goldblum had to do the same. On Monday, he appeared on The Colbert Report to confirm his warm-bloodedness. The host refused to believe him, preferring the random accounts on Twitter. Eventually, Goldblum, too, became convinced and eulogized himself.