A tweet falsely claiming to announce the death of Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro spread online on March 22, fooling people around the world.
A Twitter account purporting to be publisher Faber & Faber falsely announced the news, which quickly spread online. The account was created in August 2021 and the tweet about the author's fake death was retweeted 192 times and about 200 likes.
Minutes later, the account claimed it was run by Italian journalist Tommasso Debenedetti. The serial hoaxer has a history of publishing fake stories in Italian newspapers and on social media in an effort to expose weak fact-checking in the media. In the past, Debenedetti has falsely announced the death of Pope Benedict XVI, Fidel Castro, Pedro Almodóvar, and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. In the past he even fooled Italian newspapers into publishing his fake interviews with writers, often American, including John Grisham, Arthur Miller, Gore Vidal, Toni Morrison, Derek Walcott, and Philip Roth.
"Social media is the most unverifiable information source in the world but the news media believes it because of its need for speed," he told the Guardian in 2012. "On Facebook you are limited by access to ‘friends’, but on Twitter you can be sure people will follow you and it is being used as a real-time source of information without checks."
Meanwhile, Faber & Faber has reported the fake account to Twitter, which has since removed it, and confirmed it is a hoax.
For the unacquainted, Ishiguro is a British novelist, screenwriter, and short-story writer whose books include 'Never Let Me Go', 'The Unconsoled' and 'The Remains of the Day'. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. The Swedish Academy described him as a writer "who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world."
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