Good satire is sometimes hard to spot, but it’s also sometimes really obvious.
Fortune magazine fell recently for the latter.
Here’s the story:
McDonalds’ account was reportedly compromised last Thursday, and someone sent a note reading, “You are actually a disgusting excuse of a President and we would love to have [Barack Obama] back, also you have tiny hands.”
The note was deleted almost immediately, and the fast food giant put out a statement alleging someone had hacked its account.
“Twitter notified us that our account was compromised. We deleted the tweet, secured our account and are now investigating this,” the group said in a note on social media.
The incident, of course, became a trending topic on Twitter and Facebook, and users rushed to weigh in on the matter. One Twitter user, Matthew English, contributed to the story with a bit of satire claiming the fast food chain’s founder, Ray Kroc, once sent Richard Nixon a rude telegram in 1973 bearing the simple message: “RETIRE BITCH.”
This isn’t even the first time McDonald’s has done this pic.twitter.com/ZuKEMz1Erz
— ℳatt (@matttomic) March 16, 2017
This, of course, never happened. English was clearly joking, and the image he tweeted was an obvious fake.
Fortune magazine didn’t get the memo.
In a round-up published last Friday, the business news group reported English’s tweet as if it were a thing that really happened.
The McDonald’s Twitter incident, Fortune’s website reported, “was an eerie echo of an episode in 1973, when a McDonald’s employee sent an abusive telegram (‘RETIRE BITCH’) to Richard Nixon under the name of then-CEO Ray Kroc, and avid Nixon supporter.”
Fortune later amended the article after English drew attention to the fact that it reported his very obvious satire as a legitimate news item.
The news round-up now bears an editor’s note that reads, “CORRECTION: The original version of this article incorrectly referred to an earlier similar incident, which did not actually happen. Fortune.”
An editor, Geoff Smith, told BuzzFeed News he was told about the error as “he was leaving the office.”
“As I was in a rush to pick up my children, I only completed the correction at the first opportunity when I got home,” he said.
Vigilance, people. Fake news is everywhere.
