[I]n the chaos around Hurricane Sandy, [@comfortablysmug tried] to trick his media followers, and their followers and readers in turn, with fake news. He reported, falsely, on a total blackout in Manhattan, on a flood on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and other things that didn’t happen. Two of his tweets garnered more than 500 retweets. One drew a rebuke from ConEd’s official Twitter account. Twitter’s self-correction mechanism — rebukes and rebuttals from knowledgeable sources — shut down each rumor, but not until at least one, the flood claim, had bled widely into the television media.

read on.