It turns out that the Daily Mail story that sent Alec Baldwin into a blind rage on Twitter was based on inaccurate information.
Daily Mail writer George Stark first reported that Baldwin's wife, Hilaria, had been rudely tweeting during the funeral of actor James Gandolfini, noting that the Twitter timestamps coincided with the time of the late "Sopranos" actor's funeral.
The allegation launched the hot-tempered Baldwin, who has also thrown tantrums on airplanes, into an offensive homophobic rant on Twitter before he deleted it.
But thanks to a technical glitch on Twitter that reflected GMT instead of ET, it turns out that Baldwin was correct. An analysis of the source code of Hilaria Baldwin's tweets reveals that she tweeted between 11 am and 2 pm, as opposed to 8 am to 11 am:
The Daily Mail has stated that "the tweets did appear accurately timed on mobile devices such as smartphones and iPads," but "the only way MailOnline was able to establish the REAL time the tweets were sent was by viewing the twitter web page source code, something almost no normal member of the public would ever do."
A MailOnline spokesman has apologized to the Baldwins, but asks for an apology in kind: "We accept Mrs Baldwin’s assertions that she did not Tweet from the funeral and apologise for any distress caused. But this was a genuine misunderstanding caused by a baffling defect in the Twitter platform and we would also call on Mr Baldwin to withdraw his homophobic and threatening remarks."
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