Evening Standard: Fake websites that make news
The Sun was jubilant when it found pictures of a cross-dressing love-rat on the internet - until it discovered the story was a hoax. But it is not the first time a paper has been tripped up by the web, reports David Rowan
IT WAS the sex-and-stockings story that The Sun found too perfect to resist: a wronged woman takes revenge on her cheating boyfriend by filling her web page with photos of him wearing women s underwear.
"WWW. RAT," screamed Britain s biggest-selling daily last week. "Girl puts pictures on et of ex wearing her red lacy undies after he cheats with her pal. 'You asked me never to show these photos to anyone - guess you shouldn't have cheated on me,' wrote the "hurt, lonely and vengeful 22-year-old blonde" from Newport, South Wales, justifying the 21 rather undignified photographs of her ex that were soon the subject of much inter-office email. Within hours, the site had elevated love-rat Tom Shepherd to global ridicule.
Except that, to The Sun's embarrassment, neither Tom nor the mystery blonde known only as "pimptress" existed.
The story was a confected PR stunt by London web outfit Uboot, which sought to promote a service that lets users put photos online.
"We're sorry if we misled anyone," managing director Edward Orr said later, somewhat implausibly. "It was a bit of a surprise to find that pimptress got so much interest - we've had more than 100,000 hits today."
Mission accomplished, then. But it wasn't just The Sun that was fooled (the paper isn't commenting on the matter, and has run no correction). The story zipped round the world via agencies such as Ananova and AP, and was printed as fact as far away as The Australian. Here, The Mirror was far more streetwise - "clearly a hoax, but amusing all the same," declared its internet column - and The Daily Telegraph was wise enough to hedge its bets with a certain doubt. Technology correspondent Robert Uhlig reported that thousands tried to discover whether the pictures were the internet's most humiliating act of revenge yet, a hoax or a marketing gimmick.
Three years earlier, it fell to Uhlig to report that two American teenagers who had got the world's media salivating with their plan to lose their virginity live online had been part of the biggest online hoax yet. The pay-per-view union of Mike and Diane was never consummated, but that didn't stop the world s tabloids vying to track down these churchgoing typical all-American kids.
The mysteries of technology have an eternal ability to hoodwink normally alert journalists into falling for hoaxes. Earlier this year, this paper was one of several to fall for a claim on a respected website that ballet star Darcey Bussell was to appear in a James Bond movie. It was an April Fool s joke.
Only six weeks ago, The Mirror and even internet trade journal Revolution were among the publications that made great play of another exciting new website, called cheatingscum.com. This one also offered revenge to lovers done wrong, but unlike Uboot's site was open to anyone to expose love rats to the world.
And so they did. Geena from Glasgow used it to denounce George Harris, "who ran off with a girl half his age and thinks he's happy now, but she'll leave him and then he will be alone just like I am now". Rache from Newcastle left Dan Hoxton with this parting thought: "All I can say is if you're out there, Dan, I m having a great time screwing other guys." Brian Green from Cornwall condemned Barbara Townsend, "who ran off with my best mate, the bitch. I hated that stupid sausage dog as well." It was such a good story that it just had to be genuine.
Except that cheatingscum.com, and all the individuals named, were the creations of .net, a print internet magazine that sought to show how easy it is to attract visitors to a site with a marketing budget of zero.
Designed as an antidote to all those crashed dotcoms that spend millions on promoting themselves, the site was launched with no cash and only a few journalists' email addresses. "It seems the people who covered the site were quite happy to accept that it was genuine simply because it made a good story," cheatingscum.com's creator Dan Oliver now reveals on the site. "And in the meantime, they'd helped us notch up our target of 10,000 visitors in a week."
Nor is it only tabloid hacks whose gullibility gets the better of them where the web is concerned. The Independent's respected health editor, Jeremy Laurance, made a noble if excruciating apology in March over a piece he'd written the previous week. The original article reported that British police were trying to close down an internet site that carried pictures of a man eating a dismembered baby.
The shocking website was "further evidence of the extent of child abuse and exploitation published on the internet", and had brought together Scotland Yard and the FBI in their concern over ritual satanic abuse. Except that the pictures on the Californian site turned out to show not human sacrifice but a Chinese performance artist who had been wowing them back home with his nifty images of cannibalism.
"Let's not beat about the bush: I've been had," Laurance owned up. "A reporter in search of a story has, not for the first time, fallen foul of an excess of enthusiasm, credulousness and someone's idea of a joke."
IT'S nothing new for the uncertainties of technological progress to prompt newspaper hoaxes. In 1844, the New York Sun carried a riveting series of reports by one Edgar Allan Poe that described the successful crossing of the Atlantic Ocean via a hot-air balloon - except that no balloon crossed the Atlantic for another century. The New York Sun, though, was then fighting a ruthless circulation war and often deliberately placed hoax stories to generate a fuss that would lift sales.
In last week's case over here, it was The Sun itself that was the victim. But then the Currant Bun has never been too comfortable with newfangled technologies. Five years ago, the then editor Stuart Higgins had to apologise after the paper fell victim to one of the most elaborate hoaxes of the decade , this time involving a videotape that did not, in fact, show Princess Diana cavorting with James Hewitt.
If there's a lesson to be drawn, it's that stories on the web that appear too good to be true probably are. There are few barriers to entry in online publishing, and just because a website promises perfect copy about that sex-obsessed and nefarious internet community, there could still be a 14-year-old joker behind it. Or, worse still, a journalist.
(Evening Standard, July 4 2001)
IT WAS the sex-and-stockings story that The Sun found too perfect to resist: a wronged woman takes revenge on her cheating boyfriend by filling her web page with photos of him wearing women s underwear.
"WWW. RAT," screamed Britain s biggest-selling daily last week. "Girl puts pictures on et of ex wearing her red lacy undies after he cheats with her pal. 'You asked me never to show these photos to anyone - guess you shouldn't have cheated on me,' wrote the "hurt, lonely and vengeful 22-year-old blonde" from Newport, South Wales, justifying the 21 rather undignified photographs of her ex that were soon the subject of much inter-office email. Within hours, the site had elevated love-rat Tom Shepherd to global ridicule.
Except that, to The Sun's embarrassment, neither Tom nor the mystery blonde known only as "pimptress" existed.
The story was a confected PR stunt by London web outfit Uboot, which sought to promote a service that lets users put photos online.
"We're sorry if we misled anyone," managing director Edward Orr said later, somewhat implausibly. "It was a bit of a surprise to find that pimptress got so much interest - we've had more than 100,000 hits today."
Mission accomplished, then. But it wasn't just The Sun that was fooled (the paper isn't commenting on the matter, and has run no correction). The story zipped round the world via agencies such as Ananova and AP, and was printed as fact as far away as The Australian. Here, The Mirror was far more streetwise - "clearly a hoax, but amusing all the same," declared its internet column - and The Daily Telegraph was wise enough to hedge its bets with a certain doubt. Technology correspondent Robert Uhlig reported that thousands tried to discover whether the pictures were the internet's most humiliating act of revenge yet, a hoax or a marketing gimmick.
Three years earlier, it fell to Uhlig to report that two American teenagers who had got the world's media salivating with their plan to lose their virginity live online had been part of the biggest online hoax yet. The pay-per-view union of Mike and Diane was never consummated, but that didn't stop the world s tabloids vying to track down these churchgoing typical all-American kids.
The mysteries of technology have an eternal ability to hoodwink normally alert journalists into falling for hoaxes. Earlier this year, this paper was one of several to fall for a claim on a respected website that ballet star Darcey Bussell was to appear in a James Bond movie. It was an April Fool s joke.
Only six weeks ago, The Mirror and even internet trade journal Revolution were among the publications that made great play of another exciting new website, called cheatingscum.com. This one also offered revenge to lovers done wrong, but unlike Uboot's site was open to anyone to expose love rats to the world.
And so they did. Geena from Glasgow used it to denounce George Harris, "who ran off with a girl half his age and thinks he's happy now, but she'll leave him and then he will be alone just like I am now". Rache from Newcastle left Dan Hoxton with this parting thought: "All I can say is if you're out there, Dan, I m having a great time screwing other guys." Brian Green from Cornwall condemned Barbara Townsend, "who ran off with my best mate, the bitch. I hated that stupid sausage dog as well." It was such a good story that it just had to be genuine.
Except that cheatingscum.com, and all the individuals named, were the creations of .net, a print internet magazine that sought to show how easy it is to attract visitors to a site with a marketing budget of zero.
Designed as an antidote to all those crashed dotcoms that spend millions on promoting themselves, the site was launched with no cash and only a few journalists' email addresses. "It seems the people who covered the site were quite happy to accept that it was genuine simply because it made a good story," cheatingscum.com's creator Dan Oliver now reveals on the site. "And in the meantime, they'd helped us notch up our target of 10,000 visitors in a week."
Nor is it only tabloid hacks whose gullibility gets the better of them where the web is concerned. The Independent's respected health editor, Jeremy Laurance, made a noble if excruciating apology in March over a piece he'd written the previous week. The original article reported that British police were trying to close down an internet site that carried pictures of a man eating a dismembered baby.
The shocking website was "further evidence of the extent of child abuse and exploitation published on the internet", and had brought together Scotland Yard and the FBI in their concern over ritual satanic abuse. Except that the pictures on the Californian site turned out to show not human sacrifice but a Chinese performance artist who had been wowing them back home with his nifty images of cannibalism.
"Let's not beat about the bush: I've been had," Laurance owned up. "A reporter in search of a story has, not for the first time, fallen foul of an excess of enthusiasm, credulousness and someone's idea of a joke."
IT'S nothing new for the uncertainties of technological progress to prompt newspaper hoaxes. In 1844, the New York Sun carried a riveting series of reports by one Edgar Allan Poe that described the successful crossing of the Atlantic Ocean via a hot-air balloon - except that no balloon crossed the Atlantic for another century. The New York Sun, though, was then fighting a ruthless circulation war and often deliberately placed hoax stories to generate a fuss that would lift sales.
In last week's case over here, it was The Sun itself that was the victim. But then the Currant Bun has never been too comfortable with newfangled technologies. Five years ago, the then editor Stuart Higgins had to apologise after the paper fell victim to one of the most elaborate hoaxes of the decade , this time involving a videotape that did not, in fact, show Princess Diana cavorting with James Hewitt.
If there's a lesson to be drawn, it's that stories on the web that appear too good to be true probably are. There are few barriers to entry in online publishing, and just because a website promises perfect copy about that sex-obsessed and nefarious internet community, there could still be a 14-year-old joker behind it. Or, worse still, a journalist.
(Evening Standard, July 4 2001)
posted by David Rowan at Wednesday, July 04, 2001
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