The media was abuzz with a hoax on the death news of Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen on October 10. The initial “fake” post on social media about this was tracked back to Tommaso Debenedetti, an Italian writer and schoolteacher in Rome.

Since 2000, this shadowy Italian hoaxer has deceived several Italian newspapers into publishing phoney interviews he claimed to have conducted with well-known authors, politicians, and men of cloth, including John Grisham, Arthur Miller, Gore Vidal, Toni Morrison, Derek Walcott, Philip Roth, Desmond Tutu, Elie Wiesel, Cardinal Ratzinger (who would later become Pope Benedict XVI), Noam Chomsky, Mikhail Gorbachov, and the Dalai Lama. Additionally, international newspapers frequently reprinted these interviews.

With reference to one such Debenedetti’s interview for Libero, in 2010, a reporter from la Republica questioned Roth about his critical remarks about Barack Obama. The comments were utterly at odds with Roth’s viewpoint, which left him puzzled and he was unable to recall the interview. Scrutinising Debenedetti’s other works was prompted by this.

Spreading death hoaxes

Debenedetti quickly began disseminating false death news. A 2012 hoax that claimed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had passed away caused a sharp increase in the price of oil. He circulated hoaxes on the passing of notable people like Pedro Almodóvar, Cormac McCarthy, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Fidel Castro.

Debenedetti faked being Petr Drulák, the former Czech ambassador to France, on Twitter and posted a fake tweet on Milan Kundera’s passing in 2020. Along the same lines, the Vatican’s second-in-command, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, falsely announced the passing of Pope Benedict XVI. There is a striking stylistic resemblance in the case of Amartya Sen, when a phoney account purporting to be that of Claudia Goldin, the 2023 recipient of the Nobel Prize in economics, was utilised. Over the years, Debenedetti’s hoaxes fooled reputable news organisations like The New York Times, The Guardian, and USA Today, among others.

One of Debenedetti’s fictitious “interviewees,” Nobel Prize-winning Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, traced the decline of culture in his apocalyptic 2015 collection of essays, “Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society.” TS Eliot’s essay “Notes Towards a Definition of Culture” served as inspiration. “Did anything happen to Tommaso Debenedetti for having deceived newspapers and readers...?” Llosa questioned in one essay of the book. He, however, responded, “Far from being punished, the revelation of the fraud has turned him into a media hero, a daring and inoffensive trickster whose image and exploits have travelled the world, a hero of our times.”

Debenedetti certainly accomplished all of these things, but why? “My idea was to be a serious and honourable cultural journalist,” Debenedetti declared to the Spanish newspaper El Pais in 2010, when he admitted to his forgeries, but with stubborn pride. However, he struggled to get his work published as a freelancer, so he resorted to fiction. He stated in the interview from 2010 that “I like being the Italian lie champion.”

The “new fakes” are motivated by what? In a 2012 interview with The Guardian, he claimed: “Social media is the most unverifiable information source in the world but the news media believes it because of its need for speed.”

Debenedetti feels that Twitter works well for deaths. In his book, Llosa stated, “We live in fraudulent times, in which any offence, if it is amusing and entertains enough people, is forgiven.” There is no doubt that Debenedetti could reveal the weakness of the mainstream media. And its dependence on and coexistence with social media — a situation that could become more shadowy and uncomfortable in the coming days as we are heading towards a more digital and AI-dependent world.

The writer is Professor of Statistics, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata

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