Emily Miller at www.PoliticsDaily.com coined the term.
TwitterDead is defined as someone who is said to have died in a tweet, which is retweeted so often that it trends in Twitter so others believe
the celebrity is Really Dead. (If you can't follow the previous sentence, you need to get a lesson on Twitter because many people believe it is the future of the web.)
OK, I just made up the term TwitterDead. But I needed a word to describe the phenomenon of
social media moving so fast that a rumor of a celebrity death is picked up by other media, but ends up being a fire drill.
TwitterDead is the modern version of the great Mark Twain quote: "The rumors of my demise have been greatly
exaggerated."
These celebrities are alive but TwitterDead: George Clooney, Jeff Goldblum, Harrison Ford,
Natalie Portman, Randy Jackson and Britney Spears.
The first TwitterDead on the day Michael died was Randy Jackson of
American Idol, which I noticed in trending topics. Bless his still-beating heart, Randy was TwitterDead because of his last name.
Next came the trending of actor Jeff Goldblum who was so TwitterDead that he had to dispel the rumors by going on camera to deny to TMZ and then to appear on the "The Colbert Report."
Other celebrities who got killed off Twitter-style at the end of last
week were Harrison Ford,
Natalie Portman and Miley Cyrus. Britney Spears was TwitterDead by the weekend.
All's fair in the twitterverse since it's just basically an enormous high school rumor mill. But, my Twitter friends, you have gone too far when you TwitterKill George Clooney. NOT CLOONEY. ANYONE but Clooney!
Stan Rosenfield, Clooney's publicist, contacted TMZ -- which apparently is running the world now -- to dispel the death rumors because he was inundated with calls from mainstream media outlets.
