Tommaso Debenedetti

Tommaso De Benedetti (born in 1969) is an Italian writer known for writing fake news as well as a schoolteacher in Rome. He is a father of two children.[1][2]

Hoaxes

Interviews

De Benedetti wrote many fake interviews, published by writers such as Grisham, Saramago, Vargas Llosa, and Yehoshua, and interviewing personalities such as Gorbachev, the Dalai Lama and Pope Benedict XVI. The interviews were published for decades in Italian regional newspapers.[1]

Fake news

Since 2011, De Benedetti has created fake Twitter accounts of famous world personalities, spreading fake news.[1] On 2012, a hoax announcing the death of Syrian president Assad created a global rise in the price of oil.[2] Other De Benedetti Twitter hoaxes were picked by important news sources, fooling many newspapers, including The New York Times, The Guardian, USA Today, and Neue Zürcher Zeitung[3], as well as world leaders and organizations.[4][2]. In June 2020, Benedetti published fake tweet about death of Milan Kundera under Twitter account pretending to be of Petr Drulák, former Czech ambassador to France. The information had been published by Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, but it was subsequently denied by Kundera's family, Czech embassy in France and Drulák himself. [5]

Response

De Benedetti explained he did it "to show how is easy to fool the press in the era of social media". Mario Vargas Llosa, in his essay Notes of the death of culture (written in 2015) quoted Debenedetti as "an hero of the civilization of the spectacle".[6]

References
  1. The Guardian March 30, 2012 Twitter Hoaxer Tommaso De Benedetti
  2. BusinessInsider Nov. 2014 Biography of Tommasso De Benedetti Twitter Hoaxer
  3. "Korrektur: Meldung zum Tod von Schriftsteller Hans Magnus Enzensberger war falsch". Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Retrieved 6 April 2020. & "NZZ entschuldigt sich für Falschnachricht". persoenlich.com. Retrieved 6 April 2020.
  4. Ohlheiser, Abby (23 March 2017). "Why this Italian 'journalist' can't stop making fake Twitter accounts". Washington Post. Retrieved 16 April 2017.
  5. https://www.irozhlas.cz/zpravy-svet/milan-kundera-spisovatel-smrt-umrti-hoax-fake-news-twitter_2006181607_tzr
  6. Vargas Llosa, Mario (11 August 2016). Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0374123048.
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