Hoax Museum Blog: Social Media

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.

Facebook debuts satire tag — Facebook is debuting a "satire" tag to identify articles that are intended as parody. Although the tag currently only appears in lists of "Related Articles". So articles from The Onion will now get flagged as satire, as well as articles from some other fake news sites (though Facebook isn't revealing exactly which sites it tags and which it doesn't). Seems like a good idea. Actually, they should have done this a long time ago. Because although one might argue that people should be able to recognize satire on their own, in practice a lot of them don't. [ajc.com]

Tunnel beneath the Strait of Messina (an Italian hoax) — Italian social media was buzzing recently with word of the discovery of a narrow tunnel, over 2000 years old, running beneath the Strait of Messina (the body of water between the mainland of Italy and Sicily).


The tunnel was believed to have been built by the Romans during the Punic wars (264-241 BC) as a passageway for troops. It was discovered by workers doing construction on a highway.

But the story turns out to have come from an Italian fake news site called Dangerous News. One of the tunnel photos came from an Aug 2011 Daily Mail article about the discovery of mysterious stone-age tunnels in Bavaria. [link: canicattiweb.com]

The larger context for this hoax is the on-again/off-again attempts to build a bridge over the Strait of Messina (plans to build such a bridge have been announced twice, and cancelled twice). So the joke would be that the Roman tunnel is nonexistent, just like the modern bridge.

It reminds me of the jokes that used to be made in the British media about tunnels beneath the English Channel, before the Chunnel was completed. Such as the supposed discovery of a "Napoleonic Chunnel" in 1988 (an April Fool's Day joke).

The Unfortunate Consequence of Ignoring Facebook Hoaxes —

Dead Dog Hoax — One of the easiest ways to attract attention online is to claim to have done something shocking or disturbing. It's also known as trolling. A case in point is a young woman (using the twitter account @illumivato) who recently claimed that she killed her dog because the British pop group One Direction wouldn't follow her on Twitter.

She first sent them a tweet asking them to follow her "or I'll break my dog's neck." Then, when they inevitably ignored her, she followed this up with a tweet showing herself cradling her dead dog. [nydailynews.com]

But as David Emery points out, the picture of her and her dog dates back a couple of months. Plus, she's been making similar threats via tweet for quite a while.

In other words, we can safely dismiss her as just another disturbed, attention-seeking individual online. And she got the attention she wanted. She also admitted via tweet a few days ago, "Are people still going on about this f*cking dog thing, I was trolling!!!! STOP." And then twitter suspended her account.

The Pirate Bay isn’t moving to North Korea — On Monday, The Pirate Bay issued a press release on its blog announcing that it was moving to North Korea:


As part of the move, the site added a North Korean flag onto the sails of its pirate ship logo. And those who investigated its IP address found that it did indeed seem to be originating out of North Korea.


But yesterday, The Pirate Bay revealed on its facebook page that the move was just a joke. It explained the hoax as their way of demonstrating the need for critical thinking skills:

104-year-old woman forced to lie about age on Facebook — On the internet nobody knows if you're a dog. And on Facebook, nobody knows if you're really a 104-year-old woman... because Facebook won't accept 104 as a valid age!

Bill Gates Money Giveaway — Below is a picture of Bill Gates that's been circulating on Facebook. Can anyone really believe they'll get $5000 if they share the photo? Or is it being shared as a joke? Since I'm feeling charitable, I'll believe the latter.


The picture is a doctored version of a picture posted by Gates during a recent AMA on reddit. Note that in addition to changing the sign he's holding, the reddit toy on the desk behind him has been replaced by what looks like a sex toy. (via David Emery)

Fake news already spreading about Dorner shootout — Hey, did you hear that Christopher Dorner somehow survived yesterday's shootout? Yeah, apparently the charred remains inside the cabin have been identified as female, not male! No credible news sources are reporting this, but there's a blurry TV screenshot of a CNN newscast circulating on twitter & facebook that says it, so it must be true!

No smoking, drinking, skateboarding, dogs at mall —
Ipswich City councillor Andrew Antoniolli posted on facebook that this would be the new sign at the Ipswich Mall — warning people, in a visually economical way, of all the things they couldn't do there. A local radio station believed him, but it was actually just a joke image downloaded from the internet. No idea what the original source of the image was.

Seriously Richview Collegiate — A picture of a letter detailing a blatantly racist policy supposedly adopted by a Toronto-area high school, Richview Collegiate Institute, was all over Twitter recently. The letter reads:




Of course, the letter is fake. The school doesn't yet know who created it, but students are being interviewed to track down the culprit. Parents have been warned about the hoax. A school trustee commented, "Whereas 30 years ago, someone might have done something stupid like this and made 30 copies and distributed them, now it gets on Twitter and it goes all over." [thestar.com]

The hoax letter echoed the "Seriously McDonalds" hoax (below... so named because that's how the image was usually captioned) that went viral back in June 2011.