From kidnappings to Martians, whipping up hysteria is old news

The ‘Martian Panic’ was a myth for which mainstream media was largely responsible, writes Terry Prone

MEDIA old-stagers, discomfited by the pretensions of social media about gathering and disseminating news, support their argument by pointing to episodes like an event in Mexico a couple of years ago. At that time, the city of Veracruz was so plagued by gang violence that residents, before they left their homes to go to work or to do the shopping, would visit Facebook or Twitter to find out which streets were safe.

Then came the day when posts went up claiming that children had been kidnapped from a school and that the kidnap involved helicopters armed with sub-machine guns. It wasn’t true, but it fit neatly into the grim expectations of the locals, so they got into their cars and rushed to rescue their children, causing dozens of car crashes as well as gridlock, and — because everybody was on the phone at the same time — wrecking the phone network. Two people later ended up in court accused of having started the frenzy, but didn’t end up in clink because they maintained all they were doing was passing on information already available on social media. “Don’t blame me,” went their song, “I didn’t make it up, I just retweeted it.” At official level, the episode was defined as having “caused more hysteria than Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds”.