French Press Falls For Major Facebook Prank
But here is the crunch: Arash landed at the top of the application and became “president” (for the record, during the first session the application had been installed 140k+ times and the “candidate” received officially 9k+ votes..). He used that information and got some coverage with French media that started to report the news and really believed that a French man had become the new worldwide president of Facebook without even taking the time to validate the facts or understanding what this title implied.
Then the infernal spiral fired up and very serious TV channels and traditional media covered the story one after the other: TF1, LePoint, L’express, FranceInter, Le Parisien, …They all mentioned the story as if this was real: check it out for yourself. Arash is suddenly becoming a star in France, gets his page in Wikipedia (update: and now a Mahalo entry) and is invited to talk about his presidency and his program for a few days; public opinion is with him. The guy talks well, has some political track record and finally sounds credible.
But Facebook users are not fools and a group arises, denouncing the whole thing. ZDnet France spots the hoax, bloggers follow up quickly and the truth comes to light. According to the inquiry made by ArretsurImages many journalists covered the news just because others did and because the “President” looked credible. And then finally a wave of new articles came back to the story explaining this was a fake and that Arash misunderstood the purpose of this election. Of course this is too late and the French press has been fooled all the way.
Many tried to reach Arash for more details and reactions but without success. Did he do this out of pure calculation or was his ego responsible for the whole story? The most important point: A simple user managed to generate the biggest prank in the history of Facebook and the press bought it. Hilarious, ridiculous, but also worrying and sad for the French press (a big chunk of it) whose credibility has been hit hard.