Reuters finally admits it was taken in by the 2004 toothing hoax— which fell apart in our hands a year ago—by saying that toothing is now actually happening. It isn’t in England, it isn’t anonymous, and it doesn’t necessarily lead…
Posted by jim on Friday March 10, 2006
On Monday, Slate ran a story by Cyrus Farivar, in which the author describes how he foiled a hoax in the making about a fake sex phenomenon called “greenlighting.” Yawn. Been there, done that. Farivar devotes a full paragraph to…
Posted by jim on Wednesday August 03, 2005
While I’m not much of a hand-wringer when it comes to the state of journalism—I figure if you deliver reliable information, people will continue to read, and if you don’t, they won’t—I am surprised how few of the outlets that…
Posted by jim on Thursday April 14, 2005
Since Monday, when the guys behind toothing admitted it was a hoax, there have been some posts around suggesting that a) communication via short-range wireless is actually quite common in some locales, and b) whether or not it started as…
Posted by jim on Thursday April 07, 2005
Now that “toothing” has been revealed to be a hoax, all the stories written about it make for particularly entertaining reading, as they report on legions of non-existent “toothers” and tell of governmental efforts to control the phantom practice. There…
Posted by jim on Tuesday April 05, 2005
The toothing guys have loaded up a whole page of screenshots from websites that fell for their hoax. How many will admit they were played? I’d settle for the New York Post and Matt Drudge….
Wired News has added the following header to its story about toothing from March 22, 2004: This story is a hoax. Dozens of news organizations, including Wired News, were duped by pranksters claiming to be practitioners of “toothing,” in which…
Toothy Toothing co-conspirator Simon Byron dishes even more ridiculous details of the great toothing swindle, which in one case included making it seem to a journalist that toothing was going on all around. He writes:The media loved to believe there…
“Toothy Toothing,” aka Ste Curran (who says he was but “part” of Toothy, the other part apparently being Simon Byron), admits to duping Wired and the rest. In response to an email from me—and to the slashdotting of my earlier…
Posted by jim on Monday April 04, 2005
UPDATE: After this post, the supposed originator of “toothing”—and the primary source for all articles written about it—came out and admitted that it was all a hoax, designed to make the media look foolish. Which it did. More details in…
