How WikiLeaks' New York Times Hoax Diluted Truth-Telling With Trolling (Forbes)
Andy Greenberg, Forbes Staff
7/30/2012 @ 5:54PM |1,246 views
... But over the past weekend, Assange and WikiLeaks tested a new form of provocation. Instead of poking the powers-that-be with exposed truths, as they’ve done for the last five years, they tried needling them with a clever, well-constructed falsehood–what’s known on the Internet as an act of high-grade trolling. Unfortunately for WikiLeaks, the group seems to have forgotten that common sense Internet maxim: The best response to trolls is to ignore them.
On Saturday, WikiLeaks tweeted a link to an op-ed by New York Times’ former executive editor Bill Keller, referring to rumors of a financial blockade against the Times for its publication of WikiLeaks’ cables and expressing grudging support for WikiLeaks’ legality. The op-ed was also linked in a Twitter account seeming to belong to Keller, and retweeted by none other than Times tech editor Nick Bilton, who didn’t seem to notice that the op-ed appeared on the domain “opinion-nytimes.com,” rather than “nytimes.com,” or that the fake Bill Keller twitter account had an “I” substituted for an “l.” (Neither did I.)
On Sunday, WikiLeaks gleefully admitted to perpetrating the “successful” hoax, aimed at bringing attention to the financial blockade against payments to the site that’s been in place since early last year. “What is not a hoax, is that WikiLeaks is under illegal economic censorship by US financial insitutions and NYTimes says nothing. The rats,” the WikiLeaks’ twitter feed added ...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/07/30/how-wikileaks-nyt-hoax-dilutes-its-truth-telling-with-trolling/
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