I only even mention this because it comes from something I blogged last week, but it turns out that my previous post about Benazir Bhutto’s son announcing his future intentions on Facebook, wiht a link to an ABC news story, was actually a hoax.
It wasn’t something I took terribly seriously, and it was a decent news outlet reporting it (and we all loved the idea that a future world leader was a Buffy fan), but I was more interested in the Facebook angle than anything else. So naturally the Facebook angle was the worst part.
News just in: Facebook full of crap, most profiles unverifiable anyway, watch what you do with social networking 🙂
Update: This guy claims to be the hoaxer, and apparently that’s true. If you read some or all of the lengthy message board thread link, you’ll see he’s just some obnoxious little gamer jerk who was just looking to be a tool, but he did have the (probably unintended) outcome of showing how easy Facebook is to game, and how many journalists will be taken in by a hoax.
There’s even the implication that the Buffy and West Wing stuff was meant as some kind of insult. I mean, if they’re really wanted to insult the guy, they would have made him out to be a Britney Spears loving, Big Brother watching pop fan. Now that’s an insult 🙂