A scientist’s lesson about sausages and fake news has some people calling him the wurst.
French scientist Étienne Klein is frustrated there are still people on the internet who believe everything they read or see — so he whipped up his own scheme.
He pretended to share an image of Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our sun, claiming it was taken by the James Webb Telescope. But it wasn’t a star or even an object in space — it was a slice of chorizo sausage.
“This level of detail,” he tweeted, translated from French. “A new world is revealed day after day.”
Unfortunately, a lot of people fell for the image and it went viral — so he had to issue an apology once it was revealed it was all a hoax.
Apparently, people don’t like being tricked on the internet.
Klein also explained why he wanted to make the joke in the first place, saying in a separate tweet, “I feel compelled to clarify that this tweet showing an alleged snapshot of Proxima Centauri was a form of amusement. Let us learn to be wary of arguments from authority as much as of the spontaneous eloquence of certain images.”
Klein also lamented that this proves that fake news has a tendency to spread faster than the truth if it’s flashy enough.
To be frank, this is a good lesson to us all to not believe everything we see online without doing a little research first …