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A couple of weeks ago there was a rumour that Eminem had also been killed in a car crash. There were more before that and no doubt there will be many more to come in future. The Internet community is going to have to grow up in order to stop this sort of thing happening. The alternative is that the Internet just becomes an even more exaggerated rumour mill.

The technique to avoid this is simple: If you receive a newsworthy tweet, instant message or e-mail ALWAYS check the information out before sending it on to your friends and family. If you hear that a high profile celebrity has died and it’s not on CNN, BBC News, Sky or similar then it probably hasn’t happened.

The problem is that humans like to tell other people shocking or unexpected news and we like to be the very first to do it. You get a tweet saying that Kanye West is dead and the urge to be the first to tell everyone else becomes overwhelming. How much complete junk gets circulated and recirculated because of that? It’s like the old scaremongering e-mails (coke dissolves your insides, plastic bottles give you cancer, low batteries in mobiles microwave your brain etc. etc.) but souped up with the instantaneousness of systems like Twitter. Instead of taking days to spread and be debunked, they now spread in minutes leading to people being repeatedly bombarded with the same duff information. With current technology a silly rumour can spread round most of the world in seconds.

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Just imagine the Internet bandwidth which is wasted by junk information, the time which is waste by reading it and dealing with it. Twitter itself would run faster and spend less time overloaded if there weren’t so many unfounded rumours circulating on it.

So remember, next time you hear that someone has died, something has blown up or someone has been arrested do not send that information on until you know it is true. Don’t just retweet or forward something you know nothing about. Check it out first. It’s not difficult.