November 6, 2024

Twitter death-rumour mill: Màrquez the last victim.

Few days ago a Twitter account purporting to belong to the Italian author and academic Umberto Eco stated: “Gabriel García Márquez dies. I received the news now from New York.”

The news quickly spread and literary social media went into mourning – until doubts started to surface about its veracity: everything comes up to be not true.
This is not the first twitter hoax: other victims were the Pope, Fidel Castro, Pedro Almodovar. Behind the majority of those creepy fake announcements there is often the hand o fan Italian school teacher, Tommaso De Benedetti.

He faked twitter accounts, pretending to be an important and influential person and wrote fake news.

He has claimed to do that in order to expose weak media. “Social media is the most unverifiable information source in the world but the news media believes it because of its need for speed,” he said to The Guardian in March.

Honestly we are not sure about the aim of this odd man, but surely he gave us something to think about: the power of social media and the inaccuracy of some newspapers…

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