How we screwed (almost) the whole Apple community

Have you heard the phrase Thats true because I saw it on TV at some point? It was often the truth in the old days when people only had the TV or newspaper to relate to. What you saw or read was the truth, although it obviously wasnt always so.

Today, thanks to the Internet, we consider ourselves much more enlightened. We can discuss and examine the source in a way that was not possible in the past. But are we really aware of all information flowing up over the net? What is really true and whats not? When someone presents a bit of loose facts on Twitter, I usually respond with something like 64% of the facts on the Internet is 48% incorrect according to 52% of respondents, completely made up numbers out of my head, but it makes people think a little extra.

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?

Apple is the worlds largest company, so they can take a few knocks. The community around Apple is often very active, especially before an upcoming Keynote where it is expected that the company will introduce new products. In September is one, and everyone expects the iPhone 5 to be announced. Rumors are flowing about the phone, its appearance, its features, its materials and so on. We found this was a fitting goal for our test.

One afternoon we sketched out a screw in our 3D program, a very strange screw where the head was neither a star, tracks, pentalobe or whatever, but a unique form, also very impractical. 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...

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