Hactivists Spoof the New York Times, Mainstream Media Miss the Point

It was the New York Times op-ed that wasn’t. After months of careful planning, Internet activists hailing from WikiLeaks, Anonymous and Yes Men quietly unfurled a very convincing New York Times web page on a lazy Sunday morning. The article fooled everyone for several hours as readers shared it widely via social media, and then enjoyed a second life as media commentators caught on and fulminated over the injustice of it all. Lost in the media kerfuffle, however, was the prank’s point – which counterintuitively supported the New York Times.

The bogus article, attributed to columnist and former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, was published on July 29 under a URL similar to that of New York Times opinion articles and tweeted from a Twitter handle that looked nearly identical to Keller’s. In 2010, Keller had