Last year rumours surfaced of a terror attack in London's West End, with pop star Olly Murs tweeting from a department store that he had heard gunshots coming from a tube station. Police later confirmed that nothing had happened.
How and why did the panic spread so quickly?
William Davies, author of Nervous States, may have the answer. He says that there is a crisis of trust in traditional sources of information due to the "overabundance of content" we are exposed to.
"This is an example of how difficult it can be when crowd dynamics start to take hold to actually establish any kind of facts about a situation."
"There wasn't any alternative version of events available to anyone. There were no facts, there was no authority telling people what was going on. When you throw social media into the situation, effectively all people have to go on is rumour and sensations."
William says one of the dangers of living in the age of real-time media is that threats become amplified even when there is no underlying cause.
"We now live in an age that, because we are always interacting via our screens and devices, we've become far more emotionally alert to changes in the world, but potentially at the cost of the more traditional forms of fact-based public discourse that liberal democracies have historically depended on."
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