August 16th, 2010 by Andy Merchant
Two stories caught my eye today.
The first one was featured on Mashable, titled: Facebook Dislike Button Is Fake [WARNING] which is about an unofficial Facebook button. After installing the button you are sent through to a survey, similar to others that Mashable has seen recently. Thanks Mashable for the heads up!
The second was a post on Techcrunch titled: If It’s On The Internet, It Must Be True which refers to the media preventing hoaxes from going public and being hoaxed themselves.
After a quick bit of research I was led to further examples, including:
How to spot the Twitter fakes - A post by the Sun newspaper which goes on to say “there’s one man who spends his time policing the web to make sure that celebs are who they say they are” The man in question has created http://valebrity.com/ which ensures that celebrities and well-known people on social networks such as Google Buzz, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo etc are really who they say they are.
65 Fake Twitter Profiles With Hilarious Tweets looks at the people that have seized the opportunity to register their funny profile pictures, bio’s, Tweets, and background pictures.
Basically, many breaking news stories will now have a fake account attached to it in some shape or form, just look at the BP disaster for example. From The Wall blog: ” A Twitter user has passed themselves off as the communications department of beleaguered oil giant BP, with a series of tongue-in-cheek tweets about the current oil crisis and racked up more than 35,000 in the process - many more than oil giant’s official voice.
Astoundingly, the fake PR department, which tweets under the moniker BPGlobalPR, has loads more followers (35,384) while BP America’s actual account only has 5,409.”
Putting this into context, it’s quite impressive that so few of these hoaxes make it through to the mainstream press, as it must be difficult for journalists to quickly differentiate between the real story and so many fakes, when they are under pressure to break their stories quickly, and often in competition with online outlets that can move faster.
