Sunday, April 6, 2014

Trending Topics


Four families are left to grieve after another mass shooting took place at Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas Wednesday evening.
Ivan Rodriquez, included amongst those dead, opened fire around 8 p.m. on post killing three other memebers of the military and injuring 16 others
This is the second mass shooting to take place at Fort Hood. Just five years ago, Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 others and left over 30 injured making it the worst shooting to ever take place on an American Military base.
Twitter was the first place many people became aware of the situation and #FortHood quickly became the number one trending topic on the website.
Tweets from the Killeen Daily Herald, CNN, Fox4 and other sites poured out more information as fast it came to them.
Another popular account that was visitors frequently while the shooting occurred was spokesperson John Kirby, for Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel. However, during the chaos, Kirby made a detrimental mistake in one of his tweets. Kirby accidentally tweeted a link to Duffel Blog, a satirical site similar to the Onion that focuses on the military.
While Kirby caught his mistake and apologized for the inconsiderate tweet, it still left many followers distraught.
I completely understand that during these chaotic times it's easy to make a mistake such as this. Kirby scanned over the article quickly and sent it without thinking much about it because he wanted to get the news out to people as quickly as possible. However, though it is important that the public be kept up to date, it's also a great rule of thumb to make sure you're delivering the correct news. I can't tell you how many articles I read or tweets I saw that said so many different things during the shooting. Some said there were no fatalities, others said there were almost a dozen. It was extremely frustrating and I'm sure cause even more panic in those families with someone on or near the base at that time.
http://www.prdaily.com/Main/Articles/16423.aspx


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