This week I’m back at Red, helping out for two weeks and hopefully getting some work done on my dissertation.
Around lunchtime today we all received an email flagged as ‘high importance’ that informed us there had been a shooting at Oxford Circus, and the gunmen were on the loose.
Following such an email, we were asked to remain inside until the ‘all clear’ had been given, or the email had been proven as a hoax.
I immediately decided to investigate, Googling the shootings, checking BBC News and Sky News to see if this ‘breaking news’ had been broadcast. There was nothing.
Twitter however was a very different story. Every few seconds the same messages were retweeted "shooting in Oxford Circus" "gunmen on the loose, stay safe" etc. etc. People everywhere had picked up on the story, and thanks to the retweet function, broadcast it for their own followers to see.
It’s easy to see how it got out of control- but where did it come from, and was it true? Well the simplest answer first- no, it wasn’t true. But who would make that up, and why?
The first ‘theory’ pinpointed the story to ASOS, or poor Candice Bailey to be exact. Her tweet, as seen below, was apparently misconstrued in a bizarre Chinese whispers style chain of events.
Now to me, this is quite obviously about some kind of filming for ASOS and Diet Coke- so did someone really see this and think ‘Oh my god, people are being shot in Oxford Circus, I must immediately send out a mass email to everyone in a 5 mile radius AND alert Twitter’?
Personally, I hope not. If it is true that this is the origin of the whole debate, I think perhaps a mischievous little ‘so and so’ may have altered the message and passed it on.
However, official reports tell a different story. The Evening Standard reported a policed training document had somehow been leaked and misinterpreted.
A Met spokesman said: "We can confirm that there has been no firearms incident in Oxford Street today. It would appear that some information about a routine police training exercise being held today has inadvertently got into the public domain.
"As part of that exercise, participants have been given a hypothetical written scenario which involved an armed incident on Oxford Street. We would like to reaffirm that this is a training exercise only."
Mass panic and concern hit the nation within minutes, if not seconds. Should this perhaps come as a warning for us all to rely less on social media and revert back to more traditional outlets for breaking news, or is this simply just a small blip in the system?
