Turn Of The Screw: How Easy Is It To Punk The Apple Rumors Community?

A week ago, a Swedish designer named Lukasz Lindell opened his 3-D program and created a thoroughly impractical screw. He had an impish idea.

It is somewhat disturbing at times when the bandwagon takes of and speeds up, without people being critical. People stand up for situations that may never have happened, and spin on it which ultimately results in that it will be trated as facts, or a faktoid.
We wanted to test this, how easy is it to spread disinformation?

His target, was Apple. Or, more specifically, the community of journalists and bloggers that follow Apple.

We rendered the image, put it in an email, sent it to ourselves, took a picture of the screen with the mail and anonymously uploaded the image to the forum Reddit with the text “A friend took a photo a while ago at that fruit company, they are obviously even creating their own screws ”.
Then we waited …

So, 3-D program, rendered image, email sent to self, posted to Reddit.

Within 12 hours, the stories started to appear, first on Cult of Mac, then Wired UK, Softpedia, Macworld (UK) (see below) and on from there.

Lindell charted the response from the first mention on Cult of Mac, that did include a bit of doubt (“Keep in mind that this is an image posted to Reddit, and the only say-so we have that it comes from Apple is what the original poster has said.”) but did go on to discus the implications of the screw, if true, anyway. Cult of Mac followed up with a repair expert from iFixIt, who doubted the veracity of the image, but by then the horse was out of the barn and stories were proliferating. Once the stories turned into comment streams on Facebook, Lindell observed, any critical discussion vanished. Lindell is apologetic, but thinks the hoax was worth it:

Finally, we just want to say sorry to you who feel cheated, but the meaning behind the experiment may provide a longer-term results, that we become more thoughtful about things we see on the Internet.

What do you think? Does this cautionary tale make you question which part of the information food chain you are feeding from? My Guess is that it will make all of us a bit more cautious about outlandish Apple rumors, at least until the next one!