Quick Facts
Biography
Tommaso De Benedetti (born in 1969) is an Italian journalist and author known for writing fake news as well as a schoolteacher in Rome. He is a father of two children.
Hoaxes
Interviews
De Benedetti wrote many fake interviews, published with writers such as Grisham, Saramago, Vargas Llosa, and Yehoshua, and interviewing personalities such as Gorbachev, the Dalai Lama and Pope Benedict XVI. The interviews were published for decades in Italian regional newspapers.
Fake news
Since 2011, De Benedetti has created fake Twitter accounts of famous world personalities, spreading fake news. On 2012, a hoax announcing the death of Syrian president Assad created a global rise in the price of oil. Other De Benedetti Twitter hoaxes were picked by important news sources, fooling many newspapers, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and USA Today, as well as world leaders and organizations.
Response
De Benedetti explained he did it "to show how is easy to fool the press in the era of social media". Mario Vargas Llosa, in his essay Notes of the death of culture (written in 2015) quoted Debenedetti as "an hero of the civilization of the spectacle".