Ellie Soutter: People bombard wrong 'Ellie Souter' with condolence messages after tragic death of 18-yr-old snowboarder
The tragic death of 18-year-old team Great Britain Olympic hopeful and snowboarding star Ellie Soutter on her birthday has left most in shock, with her passing confirmed by her father in a heartbreaking post on Facebook. The supremely talented teen specialized at the freeride and boardercross disciplines and was earmarked for the Olympic team that would go to the Winter Olympics in Beijing. But despite her relative fame, it appears Twitterati are confusing her with another Ellie, who of course, has no relation to the snowboarder.
As the news of the teen's death spread, thousands took to the social media platform to express their genuine condolences. However, quite a few of these, despite possibly harboring good intentions, ended up spelling her name wrong or tagging an entirely unrelated person in their tweet.
Then there were those who despite being told they were tagging the wrong person, still continued to insist that this other random person was dead.
While there are those who intend to make such celebrity deaths about themselves and want to cash in on that sweet 'fake internet points,' it's almost certainly cases where the wrong spelling was a genuine mistake. After all, with regards to this most recent death, Soutter and Souter are not too far apart.
The result is that quite possibly thousands ended up spelling the name wrong, and unsurprisingly, it's not all too uncommon. While this time around, not too many ended up tagging this other Ellie in their posts, there are several cases where a completely innocent person ends up the target of a horde's wrath just because their name was spelled almost the same way.
It could happen to anyone, even, say, the President of the United States. Trump has a long history of tagging the wrong person during his rants on Twitter, almost always resulting in an unsuspecting user finding himself/herself bombarded with hate messages from his throngs of supporters.
Suffices to say, it's quite a common occurrence, but an easily avoidable one. The next time you're at your keyboard furiously expressing how your thoughts and prayers to the family of the deceased, just double check the spelling to ensure they're going out to the right family.