Last Updated on: 3rd September 2018, 09:44 am
I saw this two days ago, but because I am either made of suck and fail, or I’ve been too busy, it goes up today.
A couple of Mexican folks could go to jail over a couple of tweets. But these weren’t your ordinary tweets. Gilberto Martinez tweeted that kids were getting kidnapped and shot at schools, but no such kidnappings and shootings were going on. Because the news media hasn’t been the most reliable in Mexico when it comes to drug-related and other gun violence, people have come to rely on eye witness accounts which come from Twitter a lot. So, people took his words to be the honest truth, and chaos ensued. People abandoned their cars in the middle of roads so they could run to the schools. There were 26 car accidents. Emergency numbers could not handle the influx of calls.
What I don’t get is why Maria de Jesus Bravo Pagola was also charged. All she did was retweet it, thinking she was passing on legit information. If she retweeted it knowing it was false, that would be a different thing. Part of me is conflicted because I hate it when people blindly forward stuff without checking it out, but in a place where news can’t be used to confirm reports, it gets a little hard to lay blame for a retweet.
I wonder what the end result will be.
