TechCrunch has the tale of a French man who earned himself some major French press coverage after declaring he’d been selected as the new worldwide president of Facebook. In fact, he had simply earned the empty title based on a third-party Facebook application “that was aimed at designating, every quarter, a new ‘Facebook Worldwide president,’ ” according to TechCrunch. Many French papers, among other media outlets, ran with the story. From TechCrunch:
…the infernal spiral fired up and very serious TV channels and traditional media covered the story one after the other: TF1, LePoint, L’express, FranceInter, Le Parisien, …They all mentioned the story as if this was real…
Arash is suddenly becoming a star in France, gets his page in Wikipedia… and is invited to talk about his presidency and his program for a few days; public opinion is with him. The guy talks well, has some political track record and finally sounds credible.
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.
Here’s a follow-up corrective article from Le Parisien. Though my French isn’t exactly excellent, the story appears to adopt a playful tone. Of course, Derambarsh doesn’t help his situation by being rather indignant when questioned by the paper. (He appears to be quoted saying, “Did I kill anyone? Did I rob anyone?”) L’Express also appended a corrective passage to its original article. And here’s the incorrect offering from Le Figaro. TechCrunch reveals how the truth came to light:
But Facebook users are not fools and a group arises, denouncing the whole thing. ZDnet France spots the hoax, bloggers follow up quickly and the truth comes to light. According to the inquiry made by ArretsurImages many journalists covered the news just because others did and because the “President” looked credible. And then finally a wave of new articles came back to the story explaining this was a fake and that Arash misunderstood the purpose of this election. Of course this is too late and the French press has been fooled all the way.
Many tried to reach Arash for more details and reactions but without success. Did he do this out of pure calculation or was his ego responsible for the whole story? 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.
