Twitter is already becoming an extension of my usually unspoken thoughts.  Sometimes my tweets are borne of a sudden gush of emotions.  In most cases, I retweet information from those I follow, which I find really interesting and useful for my own followers. But never did I imagine that a tweet could get you 30 years of imprisonment. Two Mexicans now face the possibility of spending a significant portion of their lifetime behind bars for using the microblogging site irresponsibly, as evident in the upshots.

Two Mexicans are being charged of incautious tweeting, and may spend 30 years behind bars. Their tweets and retweets has caused massive panic among residents of one of the biggest cities in the country, Vera Cruz.  Local interior secretary of the state, Gerardo Buganza told reporters that there were over 26 road accidents, plus people leaving their cars on the streets and running to pick-up their children in schools were the apparent kidnappings and violence (according to tweets) were happening. The ruling yoked mixed judgements from other saying that this is not terrorism, but a mere stunt played out by two idiots. On the other hand, a legal expert feels that the Mexican government has breached the international human rights charter by filing terrorism against these two folks on the basis of social media use.

This is not the first time that social media received backlash for enflaming an already worsening situation.  Just a month ago, we saw how London was almost destroyed by rioters that drew followers from social networking sites, resulting in the police shutting down social media access to pacify the situation.  But there are also good points in this story: the @Riotcleanup magnetized 86,000 following and 84,000 mentions in just 2 days—a testament that Twitter is a yin and yang platform. We’ve also read the most intelligent and snarkiest tweets about Hewlett-Packard’s business dilemma, and we’ve seen intriguing remarks from figures like Michael Dell of Dell Inc. that use Twitter as a broadcasting platform.

Today, Twitter is the new boulevard for “breaking news.” As people who may have experienced an incident firsthand, they can easily use their smartphones to relay news and report to authorities, government agencies and companies—which mostly have Twitter accounts as well.  Many of them are looking to reach out to a targeted audience to harness benefits from business intelligence and the immense pool of data in this social network. Furthermore, interactions that happen between people from social networking sites are already rampant and are impossible to regulate.

While this episode may seemed to be an exaggeration, concurrent, baseless tweets aggravated a situation that is already beyond the authorities’ control.  This is a reminder to everyone of the immeasurable scope of influence that social networking sites carry into the real world. The Mexican “terror tweets” are just a minute portion of a bigger chunk of information misfeed from over 200 million tweets posted day-by-day.  But this is not just about a story on Twitter–this tells us about the big responsibility that should be observed while we enjoy using social networks.