How can you use Twitter to spread falsehoods? So easy! So many options! Here are three:
- Make up a story about the death of a celebrity. Any celebrity.
- Make up a story about Apple (AAPL). Any story.
- Make up a story about Conan O’Brien and get the crowd at a Digg event to pass it along for you.
We saw the last one in action Saturday night at a South by Southwest event, when pranksters cooked up a stupid story about the unemployed talk show host, designed in part to promote a Web video studio.
This one didn’t get picked up by the mainstream press, but it did find plenty of takers for a while on Twitter.
CNET’s Daniel Terdiman, who happily participated in the hoax, describes it in great detail here. If you want the short version, here’s a video of the event’s genesis, provided by David Spark. Pretty simple stuff: Anyone can do it.
[Image credit: LiveFromAmsterdam]