How To Fool Digg & The Media 101 By Lyndon Antcliff
Amit Chowdhry | Friday May 23, 2008 | 1,167 views
There has been many instances where the media was duped by bloggers and marketers. Between Engadget, YouTube users, and Internet marketers, false information has been known to spread across the Internet and on TV.
Engadget wrote an article that said the iPhone and Apple’s operating system would be delayed and this caused Apple’s market cap to temporarily drop by $4 billion. The creators of YouTube user, LonelyGirl15 duped YouTube users into thinking that the videos generated on that site were about a teenage girl named Bree, but her name is actually Jessica Rose. And today, Wired discovered that Lyndon Antcliff lied about a story that made it on the frontpage of Digg and spread across the media.
Lyndon Antcliff wrote up a fake story about an anoymous 13 year old boy in Texas that stole his dad’s credit card, went on a $30,000 shopping spree, and ordered hookers to a hotel only for the purpose of playing Halo on XBox. Antcliff also mentioned in the article that the kid convinced the hookers that he was a circus midget in case of being suspected that the kid was too young.
This information made it onto FOX News and the anchor argued that the prostitute should have been arrested, even though the prositute never actually existed.Â
“The thing is, I tried to make it as ridiculous as possible so it would be obvious that it would be fake,” stated Antcliff. Now all publications that carry the story have parody disclaimers. Antcliff’s story received roughly 6,000 trackbacks.
“It’s been a lesson in the power of social media and the power of people suspending their disbelief. [Traditional news organizations] are always banging about how inaccurate blogs are, but in this case, it was the opposite,” added Antcliff.
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