Everyone Gets Spoofed
from the that-wasn't-so-hard... dept
It’s amazing how easy it is to trick people these days. While similar systems have been around for ages, it seems that late last week, a website that generated fake CNN news stories suddenly found a mass (gullible) audience. First, it convinced alumni and students from many different universities that the Olsen twins were attending their university and now it’s apparently tricked people into believing that Microsoft had bought Vivendi’s gaming unit. Of course, the biggest trick in both of these spoofs is that they were just believable enough to make most people not think critically about the news. The Olsen twins are at the right age to be looking at schools, and Microsoft has been rumored to be looking at Vivendi’s gaming unit for quite some time. The site that created the spoofs has been taken down.
Comments on “Everyone Gets Spoofed”
In the good ol' days
of the mid-90s when people were more gullible to the internet, I made up a fake AP news article about “Hydrogen Beer” being sold in Tokyo. The story made it to trade publications, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal. I posted it to soc.culture.japan on around New Years Day of 1994.
Around that time, I also posted a spoofed AP article that Japan tested a small nuclear bomb on an outlying island, and Greenpeace took it seriously.
A newbie once said
I believe anything I read on the internet.