iPhone 5 Screw Rumor Goes Viral, Shows Gullibility of Tech Press

The hyper secret world of Apple Inc. inspires rumors, especially about new products, like the much anticipated iPhone 5.

The new phone is expected to be introduced in September.

So when the tech press started chewing over rumors of an unusual screw designed by Apple, few questioned it.

But it turned out to be a hoax. It included a fake photo attached to a bogus email.

The guy behind the rumor and the email was Lukasz Lindell, CEO of Day4, a Swedish digital communication company.

Anchor Marco Werman gets more details from Lindell, who says this isn’t surprising in the internet age, but what is really extraordinary is how little information can be provided to the story as a so-called primary source.

“You uploaded the image of the asymmetrical screw with this ambiguous sentence: ‘A friend took a photo a while ago at that fruit company, they are obviously even creating their own screws,’” Lindell says. “Pretty innocuous. But then it got exaggerated by all sorts of rubbish people made up.”

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Marco Werman: I’m Marco Werman, this is The World. The hyper secret world of Apple inspires rumors, especially about new products like the much anticipated iPhone 5. That’s expected to be introduced in September. So when the tech press started chewing over rumors of an unusual screw being designed by Apple, few questioned it. But it turns out to be a hoax. It included a fake photo attached to a bogus email. The guy behind the rumor and the email was Lukasz Lindell. He is CEO of Day4, a Swedish digital communication company in Stockholm. So Lukasz in a way, this isn’t surprising in the Internet age, but what’s really extraordinary is how little information you provided to the story. You uploaded this image of this asymmetrical screw with the ambiguous sentence “A friend took a photo a while ago at that fruit company, they are obviously even creating their own screws.” What where some of the really amazing headlines that you saw that people just kind of elaborated on this one line you threw out there?

Lukasz Lindell: Well there was a lot of talking about top secret screw, the users and the very incredibly complex screw, which amuses me, because it’s really not that complex. It’s just a stupid design actually.

Werman: And I’ve been wondering all day since I came across the story, why you chose to punk the world with a story about a fake screw. Was it for the obvious metaphor?

Lindell: No, really not. [laughs] That’s something we understood afterwards.

Werman: It only took about 12 hours for people to go for the bait. Why did you do this?

Lindell: Well, we’re pretty active in social media in our company. And we often get facts from people in discussions, you know, 50 percent of is like that and so on. But, very rarely people have a source for their facts. So we wanted to try to see how much of the information that flows in fact is really true. And it’s really this easy to create this rumor. If we can do it, probably lots of other people can do it as well.

Werman: Was anyone skeptical about what you had presented?

Lindell: Yeah. Many people were really proud of the media, because almost every blog or big news media, they really said, “This is an unconfirmed rumor. We don’t know if it’s true or anything.” But in the next day, when the people had read the article and had started discussing things in social media like Twitter or in Google Plus, they were talking about it as a fact.

Werman: In other words, the mainstream media did question the accuracy, but the blog sphere did not. They just kind of went for the bait.

Lindell: Yeah, exactly.

Werman: I mean it is harder than ever to know what’s truthful and real on the old Internet. How do you get people in the blog sphere, who are not actual journalists or researchers, to be more accurate about what they state and restate?

Lindell: It’s impossible to go [xx] with everything and really know the source, but if it’s reasonable to be true, why wouldn’t this be true. So that was a discussion about the screw because many people stated, “This screw is very impractical. It’s not a good screw. It’s really a bad design.” And that’s a big reason to not believe it, because we know that Apple do really great designs. And this screw is on the contrary really bad. So that should be kept in people’s minds. When you read about stuff, is this reasonable?

Werman: Lukasz Lindell is the head of Day4, a Swedish communications company based in Stockholm. He and his company are behind the hoax story about a specially designed screw by Apple. Lukasz, thanks for speaking with us.

Lindell: Thanks for having me.

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