Yesterday, Twitter was awash with people sharing the links to this girl, who apparently quit her job through the medium of emailed photos of messages written on a whiteboard. In them, she berates her boss for his bad breath; sexual harassment and playing endless games of Farmville when he should have been working.
The story spread like wildfire, with influential users such as Stephen Fry going on to tweet the link.
Except, as picked up relatively early on by a few eagle-eyed folk out there (or, cynics), the story turned out to be a hoax, as confirmed this morning by its creators.
It seems to be exceptionally common to be taken in by hoaxes on the web these days – and Joe Public isn’t the only one whose gullibility has been shown to be in robust health. But whilst you might not expect to scrutinise the source of a story you see on Twitter as you’re having your afternoon cuppa, you’d hope that our esteemed members of the press might dig a little deeper when checking their facts…
Some weeks ago, the media was awash with stories about Raoul Moat, who shot several people in Northumbria in July. These were understandably sombre pieces, given the nature of the issue. But one, appearing in the Daily Star, cried outrage about a Raoul Moat-themed version of the popular computer game, Grand Theft Auto, that had apparently been planned.
Except, it hadn’t.
The gaming press was understandably stunned that the piece had made it to the pages of a national tabloid, and the makers of the game justifiably demanded an apology – one in which the paper admitted that they “made no attempt to check the accuracy of the story before publication and did not contact Rockstar Games prior to publishing the story. We also did not question why a best selling and critically acclaimed fictional games series would choose to base one of their most popular games on this horrifying real crime event”.
Oops.
(In case you’re interested, the original piece has been removed from the Star’s site, but you can see a screen grab over at the Media Blog, and the full apology here.)
But sometimes, you shouldn’t even need to call people to fact-check a non-story, because all the facts are right there in front of you.
And, amidst all the coverage of the iPhone 4’s lack of… well, coverage, you could be forgiven for thinking that Steve Jobs probably wasn’t the happiest of chaps. And so, as a journalist, when you see a tweet from the @ceoSteveJobs Twitter account that suggests there might be a rather large recall of one of the planet’s hottest new products, you could also be forgiven for leaping on the story.
Of course, what’s unforgiveable is failing to notice that @ceoSteveJobs’ biography quite clearly states that of course this is a parody account before going on to print the story as fact.
(Again, the story was removed, fairly sharpish – but screen grabs are around if you know where to look.)
As Twitter might say: #fail
And it’s not just the tabloids that get taken in.
As thousands of festival-goers were enjoying themselves at the Big Chill in Herefordshire last weekend, a small piece accompanying a picture in Saturday’s Independent alleged that the festival had started life as the “Wanky Balls” festival.
A quick look at a recent (and again, given the transient nature of things online, no longer there) shot of the Big Chill’s Wikipedia entry would suggest that there might have been just a little too much eagerness to get the piece filed…
With the changing nature of technology, it’s safe to assume that journalists will continue to find new and different ways of sourcing their stories. But the old adage remains: don’t believe everything you read.
