French Press Idiotically Falls for Facebook “Hoax”

January 10th, 2008 · No Comments

If you haven’t seen this story yet, you should definitely check it out. A third-party facebook application was started that claimed that it would elect a new “Facebook Worldwide President” every quarter. Well one French man (Arash Derambarsh, 28) took it seriously (or jokingly seriously), and won the “election”. What happens next is gold:

He used that information and got some coverage with French media that started to report the news and really believed that a French man had become the new worldwide president of Facebook without even taking the time to validate the facts or understanding what this title implied.

Several French TV channels and other media outlets took the story as if it were real and serious, and the ineptitude spread. Some of the lies and statements made by Derambarsh would have been easily spotted as incorrect with a little bit of fact checking…

Of course Facebook has nothing to do with this, but nevertheless in some interviews Arash implies that he has a project with UNESCO and some backup from Facebook; he even declares that he has the power to reach, via a secret Facebook feature, close to a hundred million users, more than the French President himself. No one balks. Everyone buys it although this is really easy to fact check that Facebook does not have close to a hundred million users and even easier to validate the reality of this story with Facebook’s press department. Arash is actually nothing else than the president of FakeBook.

Techcrunch sums up the story well:

The most important point: A simple user managed to generate the biggest prank in the history of Facebook and the press bought it. Hilarious, ridiculous, but also worrying and sad for the French press (a big chunk of it) whose credibility has been hit hard.

Not just worrying for the French press, but the gullibility and really the human component of journalism everywhere. To think that journalists can be truly unbiased, detached, and completely understanding and knowledagble observers of the world around us is a fool’s sentiment. But here the press jumped on a story because it seemed “credible,” without any of them double checking the facts and claims behind it. It’s really indicative of the nature of journalism today, where professionalism and polish will go a long way in making a story or venue seem credible. Fundamentally, his story, image, words, and persona as a whole may have seemed completely believable, but the French press almost universally made a mistake and it reflects very poorly on them.

Thank you Techcrunch for the great story:

Techcrunch Link

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