(Image Source: Mirror)

BY ALYSSA CARTEE

ANCHOR LAUREN GORES

For two young Brits, it was a holiday gone wrong. 26-year-old Leigh Van Bryan and 24-year-old Emily Bunting arrived in LA just to be sent home after being detained for more than 12 hours.

And it was all because of some tweets.  

According to the Huffington Post, Van Bryan tweeted he was going to quote “destroy America.” Another tweet said the pair had plans to go “diggin’ Marilyn Monroe up.”

But The Daily Mail reports, he insists the tweets in question were a joke, explaining “destroy” is British slang for party and “diggin’ Marilyn Monroe up” is a Family Guy reference.

An anchor for Chicago’s WFLD brings up the big question.

“Should I be impressed that the folks at Homeland Security are going through tweets like that or should I be concerned?”

But a blogger for Bloomberg says monitoring social media isn’t taking security too far.

“To me, it makes perfect sense for security officials to be monitoring social networks and even blogs. This is all public information that could contain useful signals about real terrorism or threats to national security of some kind...”

A New York Times blogger says if this is the direction Homeland Security will take, they need to consider context.

“As American security agencies increasingly take to Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites in search of potential threats, two European travelers say the system lacks one important quality: a sense of humor.”

While an anchor for San Diego’s KGTV suggests the pair should’ve known better.

“You can just envision it’s a couple of people on this crazy trip, you know thinking they’re really hip in their tweeting -- ‘destroy America.’ You can’t talk that way.”

Van Bryan has since made his Twitter account private.