Initial reports, as well as the statement from Swayze's flack, falsely blamed a radio station in Florida. But it turns out that station reported no such thing, as reported by Matt Cherette of gossip site Oh No they Didn't, who pins blame on BNO for "breaking" the story on Twitter. (Update below.)

There's no question the story spread quickly there (see screenshot at left). Or that it spread widely on email, where we got a tip, or on the Web.

But there's something about Twitter. Just last week it was the hotbed of a gay-marriage hysteria that fooled even the Los Angeles Times. A month earlier, it was #amazonfail, outrage over a gay-book ban that wasn't. (Although, repetition on Twitter is so powerful that there are some who still think there was something to that.)

To a certain extent, this is because Twitter is becoming the mass internet broadcasting technology of choice. Oprah's on it! And so is every fake-news patsy with a BlackBerry or netbook.

But the service also makes it especially hard for slightly more discerning readers to see where information is coming from. Twitter streams of widely varying credibility all live under the same namespace, "twitter.com/." And with only 140 characters at their disposal, users turn to URL-shortening services that further obscure sourcing.

Eventually, people will learn to be no more idiotic within Twitter than they are on media they understand better, like blogs, email or the Web as a whole. Sadly, that's not saying much. And it's not likely to happen anytime soon.

UPDATE: News accounts blame a different KISS station, Jacksonville's 97.7 FM, for sending out the initial Swayze rumor on Twitter.

This will be studied by sociologists and anthropologists for years to come. At roughly noon today, someone "Tweeted" the news that the California Supreme Court had overturned the state's ban on gay marriage, supplying their "followers" with this Los Angeles Times story as proof. The story, as anyone who can read can see, is dated May 16, 2008, right there at the top, and was written back when the California Supreme Court did, in fact, find that gay couples have a right to marry under the state's constitution and, vitally, about six months before California voters amended the state's constitution to re-ban gay marriage.

But Twitter doesn't sweat the details! Thousands of users "re-Tweeted" it or whatever, and before you know it, the Los Angeles Times' own fucking Twitter feed was sending the gay marriage news out to its 19,700-plus followers. Gawker alum Ana Marie Cox was hearing the news in her Air America Radio studio (and realizing it was false). The New Yorker's Tad Friend was celebrating the news. People were literally writing that they were crying at their desks at the news that gay people can get married in California now, when they in fact can't, because no one—not even the intern in charge of the Los Angeles Times's Twitter feed!—actually read the goddamn story.

So how did it happen? Twitter's time-stamping is fuzzy, so it's impossible to locate the original offending Tweet with precision. But Gawker's candidate for Patient Zero is Meredith Modzelewski, the Brooklyn blogger whose Tweet about the story showed up earliest in Twitter's search results. Interestingly, Modzelewski linked to a now-dead ABC News story, not the L.A. Times piece.

Contacted by Gawker, Modzelewski says—ironically—that she first heard the fake news through a pre-Twitter mode of communication: "From a friend" who in turn had read about it on someone's Facebook page. The fact that Modzelewski first came up with an ABC News story, and that it later became an L.A. Times story—not to mention the fact that it's the one-year anniversary—indicates that an orchestrated campaign was underway to spread the news. Modzelewski may have just been among the first people to bring it to Twitter.

So she "Tweeted" it and the next thing you know it's a Twitter shitstorm and the L.A. Times is embarrassingly "Tweeting" that it's earlier "Tweet" "does not reflect any new news" and linking to it's "full, current Prop. 8 coverage." This is what happens when you communicate 140 characters at a time.

According to the site's proprietor George Maschke, DEA Special Agent Shawn Hacking has been posting what he regards as "abusive comments" in defense of polygraph machines to the site's board under the name "LieBabyCrybaby" since 2005. Last night, Maschke revealed LieBabyCrybaby's identity on the antipolygraph.org message board and announced that he was banned.

While Hacking's posts, which total in the thousands of words over the past three years, and which Maschke collected in a 100-plus page pdf that he provided to Gawker, do not refrain from calling Maschke "ignorant" and referring to some posters as "scum," they are generally earnest if longwinded defenses of polygraph machines.

But according to Maschke, Hacking also created multiple sockpuppet identities to pipe up with supportive comments on his own posts, including one thread between "analsphincter" and a self-professed CIA agent going by the name "LoopyLuWho" that got steamy. As "LoopyLuWho," Hacking wrote, "I just love your wit and humor!!! Are you single by any chance?" As "AnalSphincter," he replied to himself, "Loopy, I have just one question for you: What are you wearing?"

It's probably not a good idea for a DEA agent to impersonate CIA agents on message boards and create false identities. Especially one who, if the posts of Hacking's alter egos are to be believed, specializes in administering lie detector tests.

Maschke, reached via IM, declined to provide the evidence upon which he based his identification of Hacking, but said that many of the messages in question were posted from an IP address owned by the DEA and that Hacking acknowledged authorship of the posts in private messages.

Hacking, reached by telephone, said, "I have no comment on that."

[Via Cryptome; photo by Jae Yong via Flickr.]

Kim started her con on Sept. 18, 2006, the day before New Student Orientation began. She told Kimball roommates Jenssy Rojina '09 and Missy Penna '09, a star softball pitcher, that she was a freshman who was temporarily out of housing due to a technical mixup, according to Zhou.

Rojina and Penna, who both declined comment, believed Kim's story and let her sleep in their room. Kim apparently told Rojina that she moved into Kimball because she disliked her assigned roommate. Kim squatted in the 210-resident dorm — splitting her time between her "room" and the Kimball lounge — for the majority of fall and winter quarter.

"'I ate with this girl, I went to San Francisco with this girl, she was like my sister' — that's what Rojina said to me," said a friend of Rojina's. "She told me that [Kim] crashed there every night."

Kim had neither a Stanford ID nor a key, forcing her to sneak into meals and enter her room through its window, which overlooked the Munger construction pit, the Wilbur parking lot and a dumpster, three feet off the ground. [Her roommate Amy] Zhou never noticed, as she spent nearly all her nights in her boyfriend's room.

"She took off the screen and always left one of the windows wide open and the blinds up," Zhou said. "I just guessed she always wanted a breezy room."

To avoid suspicion while in Okada, Kim pretended to be a sophomore majoring in human biology, going as far as to buy textbooks and study with friends for tests she would never take. Residents of the 94-person dorm were none the wiser.

IMPOSTER CAUGHT [Stanford Daily]