ROFLMAO!!! Matt Drudge, eat your heart out! You are no longer king of the false internet rumor mill!.




Web hoax fools news services
S.F. man fakes beheading, proves need for verification
Julian Guthrie, Bill Wallace, Chronicle Staff Writers

The faked beheading story broadcast on two Arab language television stations and sent out on international news services early Saturday was based on a grainy video that was made by three Bay Area residents as an experiment to find out how quickly erroneous information could be spread by the Internet.

The experiment had a delayed reaction, but when it came, it did so more dramatically than the people who made the video ever dreamed.

For almost an hour Saturday morning, the Associated Press reported that a 22-year-old San Francisco man, Benjamin Vanderford, had been beheaded in Iraq. The report of Vanderford's death was based on a 55-second video clip that Vanderford and two friends had faked and distributed via the Internet. The story also was picked up by the Reuters news service, and the grainy video was broadcast by two Middle Eastern television stations.

In an interview with The Chronicle hours later, two of the three filmmakers responsible for the clip said they had never expected it to be disseminated so widely, and they blamed the mass media for publicizing the stunt without making sure that the video was genuine.

The video, which is intercut with grisly photographs of war victims taken from a Middle Eastern Web site and features a recording of someone reading the Quran on its soundtrack, was originally made in May and posted to two file- sharing sites, Soulseek and Kazaa. It all but disappeared until its appearance this weekend on www.islamic-minbar.com, a Web site in Arabic that has posted communiqués from Islamic radical groups and videos of victims who were beheaded by militants.

Soon after it appeared on the Islamic-Minbar site, the video was picked up by the Associated Press in Cairo, Reuters News Service and two Middle Eastern television broadcasters. From there, it quickly spread through the media by being picked up by newspapers, radio stations and television news operations.

"We made the film in my garage in Pleasanton," said Martin, who described himself as an experimental musician. "We made the fake blood with corn syrup and red food coloring -- a recipe that we got on the Internet. We used a low- level cheap digital video camera. And if you look closely at the video, you see the supposed beheading is done with a dull vegetable knife and we used the wrong side. ... We did the whole thing in a couple of hours."

Kirchner said the concept behind the hoax was to show how easy it is to make something fake look real. She and her two fellow filmmakers, she said, wanted to challenge others to question the validity of material that is presented as fact.

"What is amazing,'' she said, "is the power of the Internet. One person gets the file, they share it with someone else. It eventually ends up on some Arab TV station and is believed as the real thing."