When you’re dead to Twitter, you’re dead to everyone else.
Posted by Jose Alvarez on June 2, 2010
For a couple hours yesterday afternoon, “Rocio Sanchez Azuara” dominated the global trending topics list on Twitter, and while everyone else in the world had no clue why, it caused one of the biggest stirs among Mexican social media users. 
No one is sure how it started, but in a matter of minutes there was one topic almost all Mexican “tuiteros” were tweeting about: the death of TV personality Rocio Sanchez Azuara.
What started as a rumour, was almost immediately confirmed, leading well-know radio host Maxine Woodside to announce live on the air that Sanchez Azuara’s death was in fact true. Tweets from journalists such as TV Azteca’s morning news anchor Monica Garza, also confirmed the news. “Rocio Sanchez Azuara has died from a heart attack. All the details in ‘Ventaneando’ at 4″ tweeted Jimena Perez, co-host of Mexico’s most-watched entertainment news show.
The story was then published on the websites of prestigious newspapers and television networks.
However, almost as fast as the news was “confirmed,” it was denied. “We just spoke with Rocio. She’s alive and well and says that she doesn’t know where the rumour came from,” tweeted Ana Maria Alvarado, who collaborates in Maxine Woodside’s radio show where the story was first confirmed. This led to a series of retractions from all journalists who had previously tweeted about Sanchez Azuara’s death.
By 4 p.m. the leading story in Mexico’s entertainment news shows was not Sanchez Azuara’s death, but the confirmation that she was in fact alive. She was then interviewed by some of the same reporters who had previously killed her, and said that she had been receiving frantic phone calls from friends and families all afternoon. What then followed was a blame game in which Televisa’s ‘NX’ blamed a TV Azteca executive for starting the rumour, while TV Azteca’s ‘Ventaneando’ affirmed that the news first came through a Televisa-owned newswire service. The fact is that, whoever started the rumour, did it with the intention of reviving Sanchez Azuara’s career, since she is now living in Miami and hasn’t been on the screens for over two years. 
In the end, it doesn’t matter who was the mastermind behind Sanchez Azuara’s fake death. The true issue here is how easy it was to get journalists to jump in the band-wagon and confirm a story that wasn’t true. That is one of the dangers in this world of instant news and social media in which some journalists feel so pressured that they’d rather get a story wrong than not get it at all.
