Iraq investment hoax at DKos


There's a fairly obvious hoax being passed off as news in the Daily Kos Diaries.

I shudder to link to it, but I needed to explain what was going on before I asked everyone a favor:

If you see anyone picking up this story as real, would you please comment here so that we can start nipping it in the bud?

Thanks!

P.S.: This is hopefully an example of the self-correcting property of the blogosphere at work.

UPDATE: It looks like the original DKos entry has been pulled. Since my comments are now gone at that location, I wanted to quickly state my reasons for believing that the story was a hoax: (1) Neither of the organizations (OSBS and "Mid-America Seed Savers") mentioned in the article appear to exist. (2) The story, which talks about investing Iraq reconstruction funds in the stock market, is a fairly obvious parody of the Bush administration's proposal to privatize Social Security.

UPDATE: The source of the hoax is an article at Counterpunch. It is very clearly labeled "April Fool's Day Edition." That tends to get stripped off in re-posting, and once something is posted on a day in April other than the 1st, with a couple of links in between the posting and the original (if there's even a trail), people apparently don't think very hard about whether the story is credible

UPDATE: We've found two more instances of the story being passed off as genuine, and have notified the relevant people. Keep the emails and comments coming. With any luck this won't blow up in a stupid way on Monday.

Posted: Sun - April 3, 2005 at 10:36 AM   | Category:     |   |   | |


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