Italian teacher who kills celebrities on Twitter

ITALY: Fidel Castro, Mikhail Gorbachev and Pope Benedict XVI -- Italian Tommasso Debenedetti has killed them all in fake tweets aimed at exposing shoddy journalism that have earned him global notoriety.

The latest victim of Debenedetti’s unusual hobby is British author JK Rowling, whose death in an accident he announced from a fake Twitter account purporting to belong to fellow writer John Le Carre.

“Death works well on Twitter,” Debenedetti, who is in his 40s and says he teaches literature at a school in Rome, told AFP in a phone interview.

Debenedetti said that when he saw his Le Carre account had 2,500 followers including journalists from major British, German and US media, “I decided to make John Le Carre say JK Rowling had died”.

Debenedetti said the tweet was then retweeted hundreds of times and a Chilean television station even gave the false news as fact. The literary fake artist says his aim in all of this is to “show that Twitter has become a news agency -- the least reliable in the world.

“Unfortunately, journalism works on speed. False news spreads exponentially,” he said, pointing out that retweets by journalists lend credibility to rumours even if they are not actually published. AFP