Rumors claiming that former Pope Benedict XVI had died went viral on social media on Tuesday morning (European Time), but the church has made no such announcement.
Newsroom (11/07/2022 8:46 PM )The rumours emerged on Tuesday morning when a fake Twitter account using the name of Georg Bätzing, the head of the German Bishops’ Conference, tweeted that the 95-year-old former pontiff had passed away.
The claim was then shared by news outlets without verification.
Joshua McElwee, a reporter for the National Catholic Reporter, confirmed that the claim was “fake.” There is no information to suggest that the Vatican is preparing an announcement.
The Twitter account is alleged to belong to Italian journalist Tommasso Debenedetti. Debenedetti wrote many fake interviews, published by writers such as Grisham, Saramago, Vargas Llosa, and Yehoshua, and interviewed personalities such as Gorbachev, the Dalai Lama and Pope Benedict XVI. The interviews were published for decades in Italian regional newspapers.
Since 2011, Debenedetti has created fake Twitter accounts of famous world personalities, spreading fake news. In 2012, a hoax announcing the death of Syrian president Assad created a global rise in the price of oil. Other Debenedetti Twitter hoaxes were picked by important news sources, fooling many newspapers, including The New York Times, The Guardian, USA Today, and Neue Zürcher Zeitung, as well as world leaders and organizations.
In June 2020, Benedetti published a fake tweet about the death of Milan Kundera under a Twitter account pretending to be Petr Drulák, former Czech ambassador to France. The information had been published by the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, but it was subsequently denied by Kundera’s family, the Czech embassy in France and Drulák himself. In March 2022, he falsely reported the death of author Kazuo Ishiguro using a Twitter account pretending to be that of Faber and Faber. The story was reported as fact by RTÉ Radio 1’s Morning Ireland show and was later corrected by Ryan Tubridy on the same radio channel.
By Raju Hasmukh
