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 [ clarification needed ] "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 publicised falsehood created to deceive its audience with false and often astonishing information, with the either malicious or humorous intent of causing shock and interest in as many people as possible.
Sir Kazuo Ishiguro is a Japanese-born British novelist, screenwriter, musician, and short-story writer. He is one of the most critically acclaimed 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".
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Fake news or information disorder 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 presented as news. It has also been used by high-profile people to apply to any news unfavorable 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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