I assume you all have heard of the kid who ran amok in Germany and killed 16 people including himself. Well, now let us analyse the post-event media coverage:
The
BBC and various other news agencies claim that he's announced this deed in an "internet chatroom" before. At the page of the
Tagesschau, there's even a screenshot of it!
This, quite obviously, is not a chatroom but an imageboard. As I've been there a couple of times, I also instantly saw that it was the German board Krautchan.
Misinformation 1: Imageboards are not chatrooms and are never taken seriously anyway. Also, the media claims he had been addressing a person called "Bernd". Which is a normal German name, however...
Misinformation 2: Anonymous on Krautchan is called "Bernd" for no reason, thus he hasn't been addressing a single person but rather the whole board. So, let's see if the post is still up on
Krautchan! Oops, what?
Quality journalism
Unfortunately, our tiny server can't handle the current rush. There's nothing to see anyway, since the German press was unfortunately fooled (and probably not for the first time either) by a forgery.
No killing spree was announced here, there are only people who know how to use Photoshop.
Apparently, researching is considered uncool nowadays. It's bad enough to copy from Wikipedia, but from here? Christ.
By the way, we don't know what exactly the authorities claim to have found on the perpetrator's PC. Maybe he visited the site, but he definitely didn't write the post that went through the news, because that one never existed.
(Here's a screenshot of the quite unspectacular original, which doesn't have anything whatsoever to do with killing sprees.)
In any case, we're offline until traffic has gone back to normal levels.
Misinformation 3: The two previous wrong informations are based on a fake, edited screenshot of something that never happened.Summary: All the media coverage about this event has been announcing something that was a terribly incorrect information obscuring the real circumstances, and it was not even genuine in its basics as the screenshot it was based on was photoshopped. Good job!
