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Prankster Fools Media with Bilawal Facebook Page

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January 5, 2008

Last weekend, after the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, the Pakistan Peoples Party named her 19-year-old son Bilawal to succeed her as party leader. Given Bilawal's age, reporters ran to their computers to see if he had a Facebook account to mine clues about his hobbies, interests and thinking.

It turns out, someone had created a fake Facebook profile for Bilawal, and several media outlets picked up the information on it.

Sree Sreenivasan, a professor at the Columbia School of Journalism, talks about how Facebook and MySpace are blurring the lines of what is and what isn't reliable personal information.

 
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