Identifying a fake Twitter, learning about the new Pope

Along with today's announcement of the new Pope came a lot of Twitter conversation. This included hypothesizing about who it would be, mention of the white smoke, jokes about the situation and sharing facts about Jorge Bergoglio's life.

I was in the newsroom Jorge Bergoglio, who chose the name Pope Francis, was announced as the new Pope. Immediately, students found this Twitter account - @JMBergoglio.

At 2:30 p.m., the account had 4,443 followers. At 2:32 p.m., it hit more than 10,000. 

Reporters in the newsroom started to speculate whether this Twitter was fake or real. In just seconds, the director of Community Outreach and I could tell it was fake. We looked through to find that there were often were retweets, there were tweets from the past two hours and lastly - one of the recent tweets from Feb. 28 was suspicious. It translated to, "If I'm elected the new Pope, the children will love me more than Santa Claus."

Pretty clear sign that it's a fake Twitter account, right? Overall, the experience of revealing the new Pope was interesting than past news stories because of how we consume news today. In the middle of a class, a student shouted out, "Guys, we have a Pope. There's white smoke." No one even questioned why he wasn't paying attention in class, but rather thanked him for the breaking news information. Immediately, students and reporters went upstairs, turned on the television and opened up the Internet to get the details. Just a few minutes later, the Vatican's live YouTube video was streaming on one computer, and Twitter & HootSuite were open on my laptop. 

Using two computers to watch the live announcement and intake tweets

Twitter users posted a variety of material. This includes commentary on the Pope's bio, name choice, Jesuit identity, Argentine heritage and more. They tweeted jokes about the effect this choice would have on their life, if any. And I could consume it all at the same time. It's fascinating me that just while watching this news story, we now knew all of this information instantaneously. I hope we can appreciate that.