The report claimed to come from Conal Urquhart, a Guardian journalist who tweeted the following day, “I did not write the post that is attributed to me,” and later, “No idea who did it. It's fabricated on every level.” Indeed, WikiLeaks also denied the story: “Reports of Julian #Assange arrest are false and derive from a fabricated story. Such media smears are common. Reader beware.”
The report, since hidden by IndyMedia (“because it breaches the Indymedia UK (IMC UK) Editorial Guidelines”) claimed that “It is believed that Assange had been feeling unwell since before christmas, and after consultation from the in-house doctor he was referred to the specialist clinic.” En route he was intercepted and arrested by undercover Scotland Yard Officers, and “was then transported to the nearby Chelsea and Westminister hospital.”
But the report did not fool Paul Ducklin of Sophos. Ducklin is well versed in scanning prose for the tell-tale grammatical errors that betray phishing and scam emails, and quickly spotted several in this. The real Urquhart, he wrote in NakedSecurity, “knows how and when to use the apostrophe; second, that he is familiar with the difference between adverbs and possessive determiners; third, that he (or at least his subeditor) can spell; fourth, that he can punctuate; fifth, that he understands the rules of number; and sixth, that he is familiar with contemporary English orthography relating to capitalisation.”
Hoaxes are now so rife on the internet that readers need to approach anything sensational with a degree of inbuilt skepticism. The Times of India wrote yesterday about Tommasso Debenedetti, apparently an Italian school teacher, who has the unusual hobby of announcing celebrity deaths on Twitter. ‘Victims’ include Castro, the Pope, and Gorbachev – with JK Rowling the latest. “He claims his tweet announcing the death of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad made the price of oil go up and that another one about the demise of last Soviet leader Gorbachev prompted someone to go and update his Wikipedia page with the day of his death.”
Debenedetti doesn’t allow his hoaxes to last too long. “I just want to show up the fragility of social media, where anyone can be anyone,” he said. But some hoaxes can last for years. On 1 January the Daily Dot reported that the Bicholim Conflict, detailed in a 4500 word essay on Wikipedia about an undeclared war between Portugal and India in 1640/1, never happened. “The Bicholim Conflict is a figment of a creative Wikipedian's imagination. It's a huge, laborious, 4,500 word hoax. And it fooled Wikipedia editors for more than 5 years.”
On the internet, the moral must be to first verify, and only then trust.