The following story made it to the front-page of Digg.com within 2 and a half hours of being submitted, and as I am writing this piece (3 and a half hours after being on the front-page), the story is still on the front-page of Digg:
"We just can't compete with The XBOX, it's cheaper and techologically more advanced than the Playstation, I think this might be the Playstations final year."
That should be more than enough to tip people off that this is a fake. What is problematic is that people continue to Digg the article even after Diggers pointed out more problems in the article
You can read how the fake story was created in this thread of some body building forum. Steve Rubel compares it to the recent MyBlogLog aquisition rumor.
This isn't the first time this has happened and it's not limited to socially driven news sites like digg. The blogosphere widely reported last week that Yahoo had acquired mybloglog after Techcrunch broke the story. An formal announcement has yet to be made.
All of this points to a real problem in the social media world. The only yardsticks we use to measure the trustworthiness of a source are purely based on popularity - e.g. in-bound links, votes, etc. Now often popularity and quality are closely aligned. However, both of these incidents demonstrate that the current system isn't working. We need more.
The MyBlogLog acquisition story was jumped on by too many blogs including this blog but rumor and speculation are a lot different than an intentionally fake story getting on Digg. TechCrunch didn't create an intentionally false rumor about MyBlogLog being acquired by Yahoo. It looks Digg has removed the fake PS3 Reuters story as the page for the story now generates an error message.
