Teen’s tweet about home invader sparks Twitter alarm, then scorn

“There is somone in my hour ecall 911�

One tweet. One teenager named Kara Alongi, from Clark, N.J.

And 34,000 retweets, thousands of phone calls to the police, and a missing-persons case that has the looks of a teenage runaway hoax gone viral.

The tweet came Sunday at 5:12 p.m. Eastern time, and Kara, 16, was still missing as of Monday evening. Social media blew itself up into a frenzy to save her, riding the hashtag #helpfindkara in pursuit of her abductor.

“a girl named kara got kidnapped tonight in my town. if you ALL could RT this, that’d be amazing!� tweeted @chomikk, prompting another 34,000 retweets.

But by Monday, Clark police said they had found a number of “inconsistencies� in her 36-character message.

Well, mostly just the one big inconsistency: that the whole thing looked like a big fake.

Someone called a cab to Kara’s house at the time she posted the message, and a cab driver told police he picked up someone who looked like Kara and dropped her off at the Rahway Train Station a few minutes later, police said.

The gripes came quickly. In a statement, Clark police said, “There have been a number of falsehoods and inaccuracies reported by the news media that have hampered efforts by law enforcement.�

On top of the police’s complaints, the Twittersphere quickly shifted gears from industrial-concern complex to its more familiar posture as a grinding rage machine, with Kara — who, once again, is 16, and is still missing — now the target of spite rather than concern.

“#helpfindkara a therapist what a psycho,� tweeted @C_Cappella.

“#HelpFindKara a shock collar,� tweeted @tygaahhh.

“#helpfindkara a decent mental hospital,� tweeted @24NYY.

“As Nancy Grace has shown, the hashtag is perfect for conveying the essence of mindless true-crime stories,� wrote Adrian Chen at Gawker, in a stab at explaining what happens now. “And the urge to action of #helpfindkara means you are basically a monster if you do not spam your friends with Kara’s face. But now that she’s activated the hive mind’s Protect and Serve mode over a hoax, Kara is about to face the full brunt of that same digital mob’s Seek and Destroy setting.�

Maybe just the “seek� option wouldn’t be so bad. Authorities say anybody who knows where Kara is can contact the Clark Police Department, call the Union County Crime Stoppers at 908-654-TIPS, www.uctip.org, or text UCTIP with a message to the number 274637.

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