Thursday’s horrific shootings in Dallas that killed five police officers and wounded seven others during a Black Lives Matter demonstration is putting renewed focus on the outsized role that Twitter (ticker: TWTR) has in today’s 24/7 news environment and the misinformation that can race around the globe.
Even as the events unfolded Thursday night, Dallas police took to the social media platform to post a picture of a camouflage-clad man carrying a rifle, and calling him a suspect. Thanks to the fast-moving nature of Twitter, his picture was up and being circulated on the internet by 10:52 p.m. local time, less than two hours after the first shots rang out around 9 p.m.
But the man, Mark Hughes, was not involved in the shooting and was carrying his rifle because Texas is an open-carry state. According to the Washington Post, Hughes handed over his rifle to Dallas police immediately after learning he was being sought, and even then was held and questioned by police for hours.
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Dallas police later clarified that Hughes was a “person of interest” but the department’s original Tweet is still available, and has been retweeted more than 40,000 times.
Authorities said five police officers were killed and seven others wounded Thursday night after snipers targeted them in the deadliest day for U.S. police since Sept. 11, 2001. Two civilians also were reported wounded.
One man died after a three-hour standoff with police and three people were in custody, including a woman detained near the shooting scene and two men who fled in a car and were arrested in a suburb, reports said.
Four of the slain were Dallas police officers and the fifth was a transit officer.
About 800 people were participating in the demonstration, which was held in response to two fatal shootings of black men by police in Louisiana and Minnesota.
In cases like this, a swift response can mean everything. When the Boston Marathon bombings happened on April 15, 2013, it took the FBI three days to review videos and identify the suspects, then release those images to the public. The suspects struck again just hours after the photos were released, shooting and killing an Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer.
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Before the FBI released the photos of the Tsarnaev brothers, social media was playing a role in that tragedy, too. In particular, Reddit users attempted to use crowdsourcing to identify suspicious individuals in photos people uploaded to the site. Those efforts are largely considered to have caused confusion and distracted the public, and the FBI specifically rebuked them.
Social media, and Twitter specifically, continues to be a tool for tip-gathering, sharing videos of an event, mourning, and venting frustrations. Some media organizations embedded a tweet from Dallas television station WFAA (@wfaachannel8) showing footage of protesters scrambling for cover after shots were heard.
It’s the sort of video one might normally see on television.
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#Dallas was still the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter Friday, and Twitter’s “Moments” feature is similarly dominated by news related to the shootings. TWTR stock opened up 0.9 percent on Friday, and was trending higher in early morning trading.
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Dallas Shootings Highlight Twitter’s Outsized Role in Breaking News originally appeared on usnews.com
