Popular blog repeats bogus information without fact checking.
Yesterday DomainGang, a sometimes satire/sometimes not domain web site, wrote a piece titled “BullWhip to Fight PETA over ownership of Sex.com!”
It was based on real “news”, that PETA sent out a press release asking Sex.com’s creditors to give it the domain name so it could help get its message out. Of course PETA was joking and doing it for the publicity.
But the story also mentioned a meat company “Bullwhip”, and said that Bullwhip sent out a press release saying it should get the Sex.com domain name. This latter part was completely made up. There is not Bullwhip, no Executive Vice President Dick James, and no press release.
That didn’t stop another media outlet (if you can call it that) from picking up and running with it. Take a guess? Yes, Mashable.
Mashable wrote an article citing DomainGang and didn’t do any fact checking. Sure, it’s a funny article. But did the author think to do a quick search for “bullwhip co” or its executive vice president? Or perhaps tried to find the actual press release that DomainGang was referring to? It wouldn’t have found anything.
I’ve gotten on Mashable’s case before for being inaccurate, but at least that time it was a complicated issue.
The real problem is that Mashable has turned into a content mill, churning out as much crap content as it can to take advantage of its army of retweeters and Diggers. Fact checking is out the window. It’s a volume game.
And as Mashable goes, so go the others. Just do a Google search for “Bullwhip to Fight PETA over ownership of Sex.com”.
Because Mashable is popular, people trust it. So what was fake news is now real news in the eyes of thousands.
Should Theo and DomainGang also take some responsibility for this? Satire is difficult to pull off. It’s not like the DomainGang is The Onion. The domain name community has gotten on Theo’s case in the past, such as when one of his writers suggested that Adam Dicker was shutting down DNForum. I’m not going to blame DomainGang for this one, although I do think the site should carry a prominent disclaimer that it is satire.
[Update: Theo has posted his version of yesterday's events.]
© DomainNameWire.com 2009.
Review and rate domain name parking companies at Parking Judge.
Related posts: