Ill-informed Munich tweets were a dream for Isis propaganda

Just before going on Irish radio last Friday evening to talk about the unfolding Munich shootings, the producer asked me breezily if I would be happy to talk about “the second shooting”.

No, I wasn’t. Less than two hours after the shootings began in a shopping centre north of the city, there was little enough confirmed information when rumours began on social media of attacks on the Karlsplatz-Stachus square and at other central points in the Bavarian capital. But there was no confirmation and I hoped it wasn’t anything more than social media babble.

As the chaos grew on Friday, so did the panic, egged on by people’s overactive retweet thumbs. Many of the 2,000 Munich police officers on duty on Friday spent the evening chasing a series of false leads.

The fear is understandable on one hand. Munich is a peaceful, prosperous place and the Friday night attacks were on the scale of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, or the 1980 Oktoberfest bomb attack.

But in our modern media landscape, where the unit of time has dropped from the day, to the hour to the second, the pressure to know everything, say something and jump to conclusions instantly about what is happening has reached pathological levels.

As messages of condolence began to trickle in from around the world on Friday, Chancellor Angela Merkel was nowhere to be seen or heard. Germany's populist far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) went on the warpath online, saying this attack was the kind of Islamist violence they had warned would follow Dr Merkel's invitation to one million asylum seekers last year.

"Thank you Merkel for the terror in Germany and in Europe," wrote André Poppenburg, an AfD state leader.

As Friday turned to Saturday, the toxic hashtag #merkelschweigt – Merkel remains silent – was trending on Twitter.

But the chancellor refused to say anything until she knew what she was dealing with. And in the cold light of Saturday morning, the social media Islamist apocalypse of Friday evening had been revealed as an angry loner with a gun.

A full 21 hours after the shootings, an eternity in the social media era – Dr Merkel on Saturday was calm, composed and dignified.

The political damage to her after an Islamist attack could have been considerable. But the credibility damage of a climbdown – from an Isis terror attack to shooting spree – would have been immense.

Even the Isis propaganda department was smart enough not to try and claim the Munich gunman as one of its own. They didn’t need to: for several hours on Friday night, Twitter did. Assuming every violent incident carries IS fingerprints – until proven otherwise – is a major propaganda victory for Islamist terror.

Munich police showed on Friday how social media can be a force of good in a crisis – keeping people informed regularly, in several languages.

But after the crisis passed, they condemned those who had used social media on Friday to “play a wretched game with fear”. Via Twitter, Munich police warned: “People who come up with such rumours should be prepared for us.”