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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