T In The Park Festival-Goer Sparks Police Search With Prank Tweet
A music fan attending Scotland’s T In The Park festival over the weekend temporarily sent Twitter into a frenzy after posting that he was trapped in a tent bag and couldn’t get out, with his phone rapidly running out of battery. Which turned out to be a prank, following a police search.
On Monday morning (July 13th), just as the annual three-day music festival was winding down, a man with the Twitter handle @ScottJohnston8 appeared to send an urgent SOS message. “Hi im somewhere in green 7 someone has packed me into a tent bag for a joke and I can’t get out I don’t have much battery left,” he wrote.
It triggered a deluge of online response, with his message re-tweeted over 8,000 times and dominating the hashtag #TITP2015. But just like the boy who cried wolf, the authorities then got involved. Taking his tweet seriously, Police Scotland replied “Hi Scott please tweet us with more info if you can. We have officers with stewards in the area looking for you now.” Uh-oh.
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The Daily Record reported later on Monday that the man, a 23 year old from Ayr, admitted that it was all a hoax, which he did “for a laugh”. He turned out to not even have been on the site at the time, having left the previous morning. “I don’t feel bad about it. I can’t stop laughing,” the newspaper quoted him as saying. “It’s everywhere online… I just tweeted it for a laugh. I didn’t think it would spiral out of control.”
@Tinthepark hi im somewhere in green 7 someone has packed me into a tent bag for a joke and I can't get out I don't have much battery left
— Scott Johnston (@ScottJohnston8) July 13, 2015He continued: “I barely use Twitter. That’s probably the first tweet I’ve sent in ages. It’s the only thing that made me laugh all weekend. That was my seventh year going and it was the worst T In The Park I’ve ever been to.”
Police Scotland might not be seeing it in such an amusing light. When asked whether they would be taking any action against the man for wasting police time, a spokesman merely said: “We are making enquiries. We need to establish the circumstance.”
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