Twitter is the second largest social network after Facebook. In fact, lately the two often race chest to chest for the first place of the social network with the most members. But, whether it’s second or first, Twitter is undoubtedly known and widely used from people all over the world. Some dream of getting as many followers as possible, others just want to follow the people they admire to learn their news and thoughts. In any case, whatever goes on Twitter gets viral in just a little time. And depending on how popular the one who tweeted is, tweets can sometimes be seen by dozens of millions – just like Caitlyn Jenner, who broke the record of the most followers in just 4 hours.
So, that is the case with Queen Elizabeth who was announced dead on Twitter. And as you can imagine, news like that doesn’t take long until it goes viral. The certain tweet caused a big fuss to the whole Big Britain as well as to the international media since it was tweeted worldwide from the account of an experienced and well known journalist of BBC.
The original tweet spoke of a transfer of the Queen to the hospital where funny enough, she actually went but not because she was running out life. Queen Elizabeth was simply there for her annual check-up.
Of course the said tweet, was deleted after a while (almost directly) since it was proved false. However it was already late for BBC a worldwide known media network whose prestige was irremediably damaged. In the meantime the news had already started to fly around and other popular international media such as CNN and Bild didn’t lose the chance to spread it further away damaging even more BBC’s prestige.
The journalist’s name is Ahmen Khawaja and she works for the BBC's Urdu-language service. She rushed to apologize publically of course for the false tweet and then she mentioned is was a joke claiming that she had forgotten her phone at home, implying that it fell into the hands of friends perhaps who got her in that mess trying to have some fun.
However it seems that it’s a bit late to apologize (actually it would probably never be early to apologize in that case). BBC will not play with its prestige and things get more serious for the British when it’s about the queen so BBC has already publically apologised and verified that the journalist will not remain unpunished.
BBC may come out the cruel guy here but the truth is that when you’re worldwide known media network based on its trustworthy and original news, such incidents can harm the business and even bring it down so they have to make sure that nothing like that will happen again in the future.
The good thing is that Ahmen took full responsibility leaving BBC out of this so we all know where the false news came from. Good thing this story was proven not true. In the end it all turned out to be a tragicomic joke, but still a joke.
