Someone Seriously Punk'd The New York Times' Bill Keller

Connor Simpson 3,551 Views 11:37 AM ET

Someone's pulled off an elaborate prank on former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller. They built a replica of the Times' website and took passages of an email Keller sent defending Wikileaks and wrote an entire, completely fake Op-Ed.

The fake op-ed appeared on Sunday morning. The website the piece is hosted on looks and feels almost exactly like the real New York Times' website, but it's just a pain-stakingly detailed reproduction. The only hint that it's a fake is in the URL, where the word "opinion" appears before nytimes.com. Here's a screenshot of the story, just in case it gets taken down. Keller yelled, sort of, about the fake story on Twitter Sunday morning.

Just about everyone was fooled at first. Times' tech writer Nick Bilton even tweeted a link to the story on Sunday morning, until he discovered the Bill Keller Twitter account he found the story from was a fake. The person who set it up used an upper-case I and a lower-case L to hide the fact the account was fake. When viewed on Twitter's iPhone application, the two usernames appear to be the same.

The op-ed stole pieces of an email defending Wikileaks Keller wrote to GigaOm's Matthew Ingram. It gives the piece a distinctly Keller-ian feel, and at least temporarily throws off any detection of a fake.

Zeynep Tufekci looked up the info on the URL and discovered it was registered back in March, implying whoever's behind the stunt has been planning this for a while. They never could have predicted Keller would write an email defending Wikileaks, but they have been planning to misrepresent him for months.

Storify's Josh Stearn's credited the first links to the fake story to Wikileaks and Anonymous, who haven't taken credit for the prank just yet, but we wouldn't be surprised about that either.

The best part of the story, we think, is that Keller's taking the whole thing in stride. He wrote a pretty great email to AllThingsD's Peter Kafka:

Ah, the social media hall of mirrors. Yes, the “WL Post-Postscript” Op-Ed is a fake. (Though it steals a few lines from my exchange a few days ago with Matthew Ingram, which was real.) My tweet calling the fake tweet a fake was real. This tweet assuring you that the tweet about the fake tweet is not fake is also real. All clear now, right? Good. It’s been real.

Does your head hurt? Ours does. We'll update this if they bust whoever it was.

Want to add to this story? Let us know in comments or send an email to the author at connorbsimpson@gmail.com. You can share ideas for stories on the Open Wire.

Topics: WikiLeaks, Pranks, Bill Keller, Anonymous, New York Times

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Freddie DeBoer

33 minutes ago

Bill Keller has been an absolute self-parody when it comes to Wikileaks. Somehow, he's the worst thing about the Times, and that's a publication responsible for Friedman, Brooks, Bruni, and Kristof.

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Concernedduude

1 hour ago

You can't punk a punk. It defies logic.

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Jacques Cousteau

2 hours ago

My head hurts trying to read this poorly-written article that explains very little in a way that makes any critical sense. So much necessary info about what really happened here is omitted from the article or explained in a confusing manner. I deny anyone to summarize this article coherently and consistently.

And then there are doozies like this: "In Twitter's app, everything appears like its the exact same."

Really, Mr. Simpson. You consider yourself a *writer*? Go back to junior high.

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