Anatomy of a Hoax (Sony Nexus phone)

When I was younger I tried to play a trick on my friends by making them think Google had hired me as their youngest employee. Turns out I not only tricked my friends but half of the tech news/blogosphere, despite my press release being full of spelling and grammar errors.

I learned a lot that week about the internet, the media, and my parents...

Context: http://news.cnet.com/GoogleNewsdumpspartnerafterprankitemapp...

' I, an individual with no previous worldwide recognition save for a frontpage Reddit post, managed to alter the behavior of people in Russia, Japan, Uzbekistan, and Italy within the course of 24 hours, all from the comfort of my home while exerting next to no effort.'

'The internet is still in its infancy. The mobile space is a goddamn zygote. Stand tall, Mr. Dev and Mrs. Entrepreneur; don’t be discouraged. I get it, you’re burnt out, but there’s so much more we can do in this space. We can all make our marks, make some money, and change peoples’ lives.'

This quote sums up why the tech news business can be such a miserable grind for writers (people burn out all the time), and why online news will never make the kind of money that print did. The fact that the tech news scene can afford to throw ~250 man-hours (though it was way more if you count the time spent prepping & promoting the posts, not just writing) at a trivial hoax like this is indicative of three things:

1. The barrier to entry for all of this is pretty low. If you can type and you have some hustle, then you, too, can help fill the internet with ~300-word stories about the latest (fake) phone. And because the barrier to entry is so low... 2. ...Talent is relatively cheap, so sites can afford to pay writers and editors to chase nonsense like this. And because talent is so cheap.... 3. ...Talent is desperate, because the only way you advance in the business is to get your name at the top of the pageviews leaderboard again and again. So you'll literally cover anything if it will get hits.

All of the above leads to a massive glut of words and, ultimately, ad inventory in the tech news space. You don't have to have a Nobel Prize in econ to see what this miserable dynamic means for publishers' bottom lines.

Seriously, the real news in this hoax isn't the power of the Internet to "mobilize human capital" -- it's the power of the Internet to boost the supply of said capital to the point where it's just not worth anything close to what it used to be.

There are quite a few telltales that it's a hoax (e.g. he fails to match the DOF of the photo), but they're far more obvious in hindsight. Kudos to Android Police for picking up queues such as the mismatched times -- I'm surprised, based on this discrepancy, they didn't call hoax rather than suggest is was a mockup or prototype.

I created a 3d Model in 7.5 hrs and posted on Picasa. ~1 day later 500+ news articles, 90K web results. Did it for the lulz. btw, no one bothered to contact me to verify anything.

But what most people do is to look at the images, notice some bright graininess somewhere and then say "Aha! look at that area over where it's all bright and grainy... this is a fake!" In short, roughly 100% of the time, if tries to use ELA to support a hoax claim, they are full of shit.

The fact some of these get covered by major tech blogs only makes it harder for people to get legit news on stuff they care about.

I think he should have toned down with the bump and specular maps. The nature of the "scuffiness" was what tipped me off immediately. Also the pogo pins just didn't look right. Could have done without those too.

I'd say this whole story supports an exactly opposite conclusion. People are predictable and easy to manipulate, and it was to be expected that various blogs and news sources would pick it up; they live on eyeballs anyway.

It's sad to see that:

- political news suck

- general news are usually full of shit

- science news are most often completely inaccurate

- tech news just proven itself again to be as reliable as the others I mentioned

Because, hell, it's all about clicks and eyeballs and ad impressions. I wonder why people still read this stuff if it is to be expected that most of news out there will be false.

"Blogs get paid by the click, not the accuracy. If they can get you to click on the rumor, then click again on the correction, they are ahead 2 clicks that they wouldn't have had if they fact checked in the first place." (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4676633)

Meh. So is there anything we can read to get some reliable information?

The supposedly leaked photos of the LG Nexus have it looking like an iPhone clone, albeit a very good one: http://bostinno.com/2012/10/19/lg-nexus-4-release-date-lg-ne...

To my eye, the "Nexus X" is one of the freshest designs in the phone space in recent memory.

I can accept mistakes made on good faith or a benign April Fool joke, but not this kind of deliberate lies and manipulations. It is a waste of everybody's time with no real value in the end.

Journalists indeed should check their reference sources, but it doesn't mean it is OK to deliberately faking news just to check if the journalists have done their job. Their time could be used in other much more productive ways. I am quite appalled to see people are implicitly encouraging this kind of behavior, little did they realize this is eroding the trust we have had in the tech community.

If we don't do something, more and more fake news will appear. I presume all of us love interesting and trustworthy news articles, no?

Bottom line: I recognize there are always fake news articles on Internet, my point is we should condemn and put a stop to this kind of deliberate hoax to prevent the further deteriorating of news quality.