Quck Links: Grey Lady Ghost, etc.

• Is this a picture of the Grey Lady Ghost of Dudley Castle? [Birmingham Mail]
• Sondra Arquiett had agreed to help with a drug investigation as part of a sentencing deal, but didn't realize this help would include the DEA's use of her pictures to create a fake Facebook page. Now she's suing them. [BBC News]
• Reports of an armed clown chasing students at Golden Valley High School are a hoax, says the principal. [Bakersfield Californian]
• David LaVera's particular con is that he claims he was an actor in the Twilight movies. [KCCI]
• Two teenage girls from Utah now admit that their story about being kidnapped back in September was a hoax. [Fox13now.com]
• A fake blog about a blond child bride has become the most visited blog in Norway. [Smithsonian]
• New York City is sending fake Ebola patients to emergency rooms to test hospital readiness. [CBS New York]
• The contention of a $2 billion lawsuit filed recently in Chicago is that Aunt Jemima was a real person, and that Quaker Oats owes her descendants money. [takepart.com]
• Montana authorities say they're not going to prosecute Toby Bridges (who's known as an "anti-wolf extremist") with running down two wolves, because they can't find any evidence that he did, despite his claims on Facebook to have done so. [Montana Standard]
• The Twitter Death Machine. [USA Today]

Quick Links: Ebola Zombie Victim, etc.

• A viral picture apparently showing a Liberian Ebola victim who had 'risen from the dead' is actually a screenshot from the film World War Z. [mirror.co.uk]
  
• Amy Argetsinger argues that it's time to bury the idea that Andy Kaufman faked his own death [washington post]
• Craig Silverman offers an in-depth analysis of that pumpkin spice condom hoax from a few weeks back [digg.com]
• The Great Exhibition Toilet Myths (such as that "the public toilet was invented by the plumber George Jennings, for the Great Exhibition of 1851") [Yale Books Blog]
• News article from 1909 claimed that a pen made from the headboard of EA Poe's coffin kept writing the word "Lenore" backwards [Haunted Ohio]

Emergent — An article in the NY Times briefly profiles Emergent, a new website created by Craig Silverman which aims to track the dissemination of rumors online. It records how many shares a rumor has received, and also assesses whether the rumor is true, false, or unverified. Looks like a very useful site!

The NY Times article notes that the problem with false rumors is that "they're often much more interesting than the truth." Therefore, they get more widely shared. The challenge, says the Times, "is to make the facts as fun to share as the myths they seek to replace." Nice goal, but I don't see it ever happening. The false rumors can endlessly transform themselves to appeal to our deepest hopes and fears. Whereas the facts always have to remain boringly factual.

Asahi Shimbun Corrects Itself — The Asahi Shimbun (circulation 7.6 million) recently issued some corrections. It was not true, despite previous statements, that writer Seiji Yoshida had kidnapped 200 women during World War II to act as "comfort women." Apparently Yoshida made up his claims.

Nor was it true that workers at the Fukushima plant had disobeyed orders and fled the plant during the nuclear disaster. The newspaper misinterpreted documents.

Finally, it wasn't true that the paper had interviewed the president of Nintendo. The paper had lifted responses from an interview published on the Nintendo website and passed them off as an Asahi Shimbun interview. iMediaEthics