After School Shooting In Newtown, Connecticut, A Social Media Tragedy Plays Out On TV, Web

Facebook doesn't kill people. The media using Facebook kills people's reputations.

Like a lot of media members, we started Googling and Facebook and Twitter searching for a name being reported as the name of the gunman in a horrific shooting death of 27 people, including 20 children, six adults, and the shooter himself, in the kindergarten classroom and halls of the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. You never know what connections a shooter might have to your world--your personal world, your business world.

Searching for the name, we found lots. Some correctional officer. A few kids. And then this one guy, a 20-something-looking guy in dark glasses. All of the names matched the reported name of the shooter, Ryan Lanza. (It should be noted that there are several people named "Adolf Hitler" on social media, but it doesn't mean Nazi No. 1 is alive and tweeting.) There was talk of a trench coat and some military game-themed stuff on this one Ryan Lanza's Facebook page. In our internal chat we wondered whether this could be the guy. His hometown was listed as Newtown, CT. But he lived in Hoboken, New Jersey.

And then it happened. Pete Williams from NBC News mentioned that Ryan Lanza had a connection to Hoboken.

They were going with the Facebook kid.

Then Fox used his picture (the blurring is ours).

Then came the denials and claims of wrong ID. The New York Times' Jenna Wortham sent around an image of what looked like statuses from the Facebook Ryan Lanza himself (could be that those reactions were fake, too).

At the time of this post, Twitter is alive with people convinced that the Facebook Ryan Lanza is the guy. And now there's some questioning about whether Ryan Lanza is the right name at all.

At around 3:45 p.m., NBC's Pete Williams said to anchor Lester Holt: "This is an unusual situation where information is being corrected and revised, and, Lester, maybe this is one of them." Not that they had any more solid information with which to correct the potentially slanderous misuse of a young man's identity in association with one of the worst massacres in recent history.

But just before a teary eyed President Barack Obama offered his condolences to the families from the White House, NBC anchor Lester Holt perfectly summed up the situation for his and other networks' reckless assumptions:

"We don't want to get ahead of ourselves," he said, "But information never seems to come as soon as we want it."

Ivana Trump Marlee Matlin