You know those fire drills at work where everybody practices what they’ll do if a real fire happens?
Well, a similar scenario played out Wednesday morning and left lots of media folks wishing they had never heard of Twitter.
BBC reporter Ahmen Khawaja tweeted from her personal account that Queen Elizabeth had been hospitalized.
Within minutes, CNN Newssource tweeted – and then retracted - that information to its 12,000-plus followers.
A second tweet from Khawaja said the Queen had died. Both of those tweets were deleted.
A German publication even picked up the story, and then withdrew it.
In a terrible coincidence that compounded the freak out and the confusion, the Queen really had been admitted to a hospital for her annual check-up.
Khawaja first claimed someone had used her cellphone to post the "prank" tweets. But the BBC later said Khawaja was participating in a newsroom exercise on reacting to the death of the Queen, and used her very real-life, personal Twitter account to practice.
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