A perfect vicious circle

A moment ago, I was logging off Twitter for the day when I spied the disturbing trending topic “RIP NELSON MANDELA.” Oh my gosh – Mandela is dead? I clicked over to the New York Times website. Nothing. I flipped on CNN. Nada. Hey, what’s going on? I clicked back to Twitter. Turns out it is a ghastly hoax. Mandela is alive and well. Some soulless twit-wit posted the fake news and off to the races it went. Naturally, the twitterverse is in a raucous uproar, thereby keeping “RIP NELSON MANDELA” a huge topic trending at a rate of about 2,400 tweets every 10 seconds. It is the perfect vicious circle, and probably just what the original author had in mind. This almost validates Henry David Thoreau’s fear that “men have become the tools of their tools.” Nelson Mandela once said that the death penalty was a “reflection of the animal instinct, still present in human beings." He could have said the same about slander on Twitter. Disgusting.