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Tommaso Debenedetti (born in 1969) is an Italian writer and a schoolteacher in Rome who is known for writing fake news. He is a father of two children. [1] [2] .
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Tommaso Debenedetti (born in 1969) is an Italian writer and a schoolteacher in Rome who is known for writing fake news. He is a father of two children. [1] [2] .
In the 2000s, Debenedetti tricked a number of Italian newspapers into publishing fake, lengthy interviews that he claimed to have conducted with various famous personalities, such as American writers John Grisham, Gore Vidal and Philip Roth. [1] The last one proved to be his undoing: in 2010, a journalist from la Repubblica asked Roth about criticisms of Barack Obama that he had allegedly made in an interview for Libero ; Roth was confused because the quotes were completely opposite to his view. This triggered a media reaction and scrutiny of Debendetti's other work. [3]
Since 2011, Debenedetti has created fake Twitter accounts of famous world personalities, spreading fake news. [1] In 2012, a hoax announcing the death of Syrian president Assad created a global rise in the price of oil. [2] Other Debenedetti Twitter hoaxes were picked by important news sources, fooling many newspapers, including The New York Times , The Guardian , USA Today , and Neue Zürcher Zeitung , [4] as well as world leaders and organizations. [5] [2] In June 2020, Benedetti published fake tweet about death of Milan Kundera under Twitter account pretending to be of Petr Drulák, former Czech ambassador to France. The information had been published by Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, but it was subsequently denied by Kundera's family, Czech embassy in France and Drulák himself. [6] In March 2022, he falsely reported the death of author Kazuo Ishiguro using a Twitter account pretending to be that of Faber and Faber. The story was reported as fact by RTÉ Radio 1's Morning Ireland show and was later corrected by Ryan Tubridy on the same radio channel. [7] In 2022, he created a fake Twitter account in which he claimed that Pope Benedict XVI had died, something that did occur later that year. In October 2023, he used a Twitter account purporting to be that of Claudia Goldin to falsely claim that Amartya Sen had died [8] .
Debenedetti explained he did it "to show how easy it is to fool the press in the era of social media". Mario Vargas Llosa, in his essay Notes of the death of culture (written in 2015) quoted Debenedetti as "an hero of the civilization of the spectacle". [9]
A hoax is a widely publicized falsehood so fashioned as to invite reflexive, unthinking acceptance by the greatest number of people of the most varied social identities and of the highest possible social pretensions to gull its victims into putting up the highest possible social currency in support of the hoax.
Sir Kazuo Ishiguro is a Japanese-born British novelist, screenwriter, musician, and short-story writer. He is one of the most critically acclaimed and praised contemporary fiction authors writing in English, having been awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature. In its citation, the Swedish Academy described Ishiguro as a writer "who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world".
Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, 1st Marquess of Vargas Llosa, more commonly known as Mario Vargas Llosa, is a Peruvian novelist, journalist, essayist and former politician, who also holds citizenship of Spain and the Dominican Republic. Vargas Llosa is one of Latin America's most significant novelists and essayists and one of the leading writers of his generation. Some critics consider him to have had a larger international impact and worldwide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom. In 2010, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat." He also won the 1967 Rómulo Gallegos Prize, the 1986 Prince of Asturias Award, the 1994 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the 1995 Jerusalem Prize, the 2012 Carlos Fuentes International Prize, and the 2018 Pablo Neruda Order of Artistic and Cultural Merit. In 2021, he was elected to the Académie française.
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A sock puppet is a false online identity used for deceptive purposes. The term originally referred to a hand puppet made from a sock. Sock puppets include online identities created to praise, defend, or support a person or organization, to manipulate public opinion, or to circumvent restrictions such as viewing a social media account that a user is blocked from. Sock puppets are unwelcome in many online communities and forums.
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April Fools' Day or All Fools' Day is an annual custom on 1 April consisting of practical jokes and hoaxes. Jokesters often expose their actions by shouting "April Fools!" at the recipient. Mass media can be involved with these pranks, which may be revealed as such the following day. The custom of setting aside a day for playing harmless pranks upon one's neighbour has been relatively common in the world historically.
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A media prank is a type of media event, perpetrated by staged speeches, activities, or press releases, designed to trick legitimate journalists into publishing erroneous or misleading articles. The term may also refer to such stories if planted by fake journalists, as well as the false story thereby published. A media prank is a form of culture jamming generally done as performance art or a practical joke for purposes of a humorous critique of mass media.
A death hoax is a deliberate report of someone's death that is later proven to be untrue. In some cases it might be because the person has intentionally faked death.
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Fake news is false or misleading information presented as news. Fake news often has the aim of damaging the reputation of a person or entity, or making money through advertising revenue. Although false news has always been spread throughout history, the term "fake news" was first used in the 1890s when sensational reports in newspapers were common. Nevertheless, the term does not have a fixed definition and has been applied broadly to any type of false information. It's also been used by high-profile people to apply to any news unfavourable to them. Further, disinformation involves spreading false information with harmful intent and is sometimes generated and propagated by hostile foreign actors, particularly during elections. In some definitions, fake news includes satirical articles misinterpreted as genuine, and articles that employ sensationalist or clickbait headlines that are not supported in the text. Because of this diversity of types of false news, researchers are beginning to favour information disorder as a more neutral and informative term.
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FactCheckArmenia.com (@FCArmenia) is a website whose stated purpose is "exposing Armenian distortions and hypocrisies". Despite the name, it is not a fact-checking website; it publishes false information denying the Armenian genocide. Among the false claims made by the website is the assertion that "no Armenians were harmed" during the deportation of Armenian intellectuals on 24 April 1915.
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