In social networks, there are those who find a way to have fun with dramatic events. Tomasso Debenedetti is a 54-year-old Italian journalist who has dedicated his life to the hoax. The last, the alleged death of the former vice president and former Minister of Economy and Finance of the Government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Elena Salgado. Debenedetti has intoxicated again, this time through a false Twitter account in which he has posed as José Ramón Gómez Besteiro, a delegate of the Government of Galicia. Some media have fallen into the trap and the news has been circulated as if it were true, even being retweeted by a former minister.
The modus operandi is usually always the same in these cases. A newly created Twitter account appears —in the case of the fake Gómez Besteiro, it only has 4 tweets and the first was only 12 hours ago— of a relevant character related to the victim. Without much further work, Debenedetti points to the unfortunate event: in this case, shortly after 12:00, two tweets, one in Spanish and the other in Galician, announcing Salgado’s death.
This becomes a trigger for many media outlets that, upon seeing the apparently official account of a personality from the world of politics, give credibility to the announcement and release the information. A short time later, and to close his personal circus, Debenedetti closed the hitherto non-existent debate in a tweet close to a sort of sociological and professional experiment: “Fake account created by Italian journalist Tommasso Debenedetti.” End of the news.
Debenedetti is an Italian writer and schoolteacher in Rome known for writing fake news. For ten years he lavished himself in various Italian regional media publishing false interviews with personalities such as Gorbachev, the Dalai Lama and Pope Benedict XVI. The interviews were published for decades in regional Italian newspapers and, in addition, he was quoted on several occasions by writers such as Grisham, Saramago, Vargas Llosa or Yehoshua.
It all started in the year 2000. In an interview with El Mundo in 2012, he acknowledged that the start of the deception was an interview with the American writer Gore Vidal canceled at the last moment. “I had agreed to publish the interview in the Neapolitan newspaper ‘Il Mattino,'” he said at the time. The pressure received was great and, therefore, “I decided to invent it.”
In 2011, with the appearance of social networks, his tricks became more sophisticated. Since then, Debenedetti has created fake Twitter accounts of world famous personalities, spreading fake news. In 2012, a hoax announcing the death of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad caused a global rise in the price of oil.
It has managed to fool big newspapers like The New York Times, The Guardian, USA Today and Neue Zürcher Zeitung. In June 2020, Benedetti posted a fake tweet about the death of Milan Kundera on the Twitter account posing as Petr Drulák, a former Czech ambassador to France. In 2022, he first killed author Kazuo Ishiguro—using a Twitter account purporting to be Faber and Faber’s—and Pope Benedict XVI—claiming to be Georg Bätzing, president of the German Bishops’ Conference.
Its objective is as simple as it is alarming and perverse: “to show how easy it is to deceive the press in the age of social networks.”
