How to spread an Apple rumor

“Rumors are a fact of life for those covering Apple. We see them every single day - they might have a grain of truth, are mostly true or are flat-out false. It’s rare that we get to see the genesis of one of those rumors, however. On Monday a blog run by Swedish production company Day4 explained how last week some of its employees manipulated the Apple rumor mill through the creation of a piece of (fake) evidence that Apple was planning to create a proprietary set of screws for upcoming devices,” Erica Ogg reports for GigaOM.

“Blogs from Wired to Yahoo to MacWorld and Cult of Mac picked up on it within 12 hours and reposted it, labeling it as a rumor. But, as Day4 explains, the vast majority of readers took the news report of the rumor and begin discussing it as if it were 100 percent true,” Ogg reports. “We know Day4 isn’t the only group that has tried something like this. With the prevalence of Apple rumor blogs, and the speed of social media, any story about Apple with a whiff of semi-plausibility has near-instant re-blog potential.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: You should see some of the stuff we get in our inboxes! The asymmetrical screw story at least had a whiff of plausibility.

(BTW, to the guy who keeps sending us the images of the spacecraft and the aliens who he claims actually designed Apple’s “Mothership” campus, please continue sending them!

Related article:
Apple working on top secret asymmetric screw to prevent users from getting into devices – August 8, 2012