Facebook have probably just had it’s biggest ever hoax occurred in its history and a prank to beat this will have to be something special. 

It was all started by a simple third-party Facebook application that was aimed at designating every quarter, a new “Facebook Worldwide president”.

Then a 28 year-old French man called Arash Derambarsh decided to run for the presidency believing this the real thing he must have been insane to think this and started to invite his friends and created FaceBook President which isn’t really talking about.

However, this is where the funny part comes in, Arash in fact landed at the top of the application and became “president” (during its first session the application had been installed 140,000+ times and the “candidate” received officially over 9000 votes). With this information Arash, got some coverage with French media that started to report the news and really believed that a French man had become the new worldwide president of Facebook. This was without taking the time to validate this information or even understanding what this title implied.

The serious French TV Channels & Traditional Media  all started to cover this story which included TF1, LePoint, L’express, FranceInter and Le Parisien. They all didn’t do one basic thing, seeing if this story was legit and all thought it was real. 

Proof:

 

When all this was happening Arash was becoming a star in France and even got his own Wikipedia page and Mahalo entry. He was invited to talk about his presidency and his program for a few day and since he has some political track record it finally sounds credible.

Obviously Facebook has nothing to do with this, as its a third-part application. This however, doesn’t stop Arash implying that he has a project with UNESCO and some backup from Facebook and even declares that he has the power to reach via this secret Facebook feature close to a hundred million users which is more than the French President himself.  See: http://www.leparisien.fr/home/maville/hautsdeseine/articles.htm?articleid=292316688  and everyone believes this information. Even though Facebook does not have close to a hundred million users: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook and if they validated the reality of this story with Facebook’s press department they’d also see its fake.

The FaceBook user’s started to get annoyed and groups started arising announcing this wasn’t the real thing and ArretsurImages revealed that journalists covered the news because, others did and the “President” looked credible. As a result new articles were released explaining this was a fake story (so the journalists didn’t look like complete idiots) and that Arash misunderstood the purpose of this election. http://tf1.lci.fr/infos/high-tech/0,,3672301,00-president-facebook-admet-etre-trompe-.html 

However, this is too late the French press were completly hoaxed by this simple FaceBook third party and didn’t do any research.

It goes to show believe anything you read in the news  

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