Yesterday, NBC News' main Twitter account was hacked and several fake Tweets about planes crashing into Ground Zero went out. The same group takes responsibility for Fox News' hacked Twitter feed not long ago, too. So these Tweets went out to the public, apparently coming from a major news source.

I mentioned in an earlier post about the signal-to-noise ratio of Twitter. Unfortunately, deliberate disinformation is part of the noise, on top of gossip, speculation, and otherwise uninformative content.

Although usually just an annoyance to the public and an embarassment to the organization that was hacked, considering the rapidity with which information is distributed and re-distributed nowadays, even one ill timed fake message like this, from an apparently credible source, could rapidly take on a life of its own. A Tweet about a fake tsunami after some region suffers a strong earthquake, a Tweet during some civil disturbance that greatly inflames passions, a fake Tweet about a dam or levee breaking in the regions already on edge from flooding, the list goes on.

Although apparently only three NBC employees knew the password to the Twitter account, one was the victim of a phishing scam and he clicked on an attachment that he should've known better than to try and open.