scouse_roar in a nutshell.

-PB

Haha I started browsing twitter fairly recently and I'm amazed people actually engage the bloke.

scouse_roar in a nutshell.

-PB

[size=9]Trick or tweet: the boy who hoaxed the football world[/size]
Sam Gardiner is a football-mad schoolboy, but no one took his opinions seriously. So he created a fake Twitter personality and soon was talking tactics with Premiership players. Tim Lewis meets the spoofer extraordinaire


Tim Lewis   
The Observer, Sunday 23 March 2014   


He tweets, he scores: ‘I wanted to prove a point,’ says Sam Gardiner. Photograph: Suki Dhanda for the Observer

For five minutes, Sam Gardiner panicked. He had been rumbled: he wasn't Dominic Jones. He hadn't spent years as a football scout, going to games most nights, searching for that one-in-a-million prospect, getting home at 3am, as he once claimed in an article he had written. He wasn't now a reporter for Goal, the international football magazine. He didn't look anything like the picture that was his Twitter identity.

But then Gardiner calmed down. He did a web search to check his legal position, which indicated that he hadn't committed fraud, because he had invented a new persona, not stolen someone else's. He went back on Twitter and with a few keystrokes created Samuel Rhodes, a freelance journalist for the Daily Telegraph and Financial Times. He trawled Google images for a byline photograph and on page 11 he found a clean-cut, blond chap with a resemblance to the Australian actor Simon Baker. His Twitter profile was back up instantly and scarcely any of his 3,000 followers even noticed.

Gardiner, of course, is not Dominic Jones or Samuel Rhodes; the reality is both more interesting and more humdrum. Gardiner is a 17-year-old from High Barnet, north London. His dad runs a financial trading company and his mum has a business selling leather coats and sheepskin products. He is currently doing his A-levels at JFS, an academic powerhouse that is Europe's largest Jewish secondary school, and he wants to study politics and economics at university. I meet him at Nando's in Kingsbury for an early lunch, squeezed in between double maths and politics.

In January, the Samuel Rhodes account – at that point with 20,000-plus followers – was deleted by Twitter. He was busted on this occasion by Kate Day, director of digital content at the Telegraph. "I had more followers than her," Gardiner notes, slightly peeved, before conceding: "I don't know, she was probably right." Depending on how you view these things, Gardiner is either a harmless hoaxer with an opportunistic spirit, or he's a reminder of the dangers we all face now that we're taking more of our news from social media and non-traditional sources.

So why did Gardiner do it? "I wanted to prove a point," he says between mouthfuls of peri-peri chicken. "When I was 15, I created a Twitter account that was me – Sam Gardiner, Arsenal fan – but no one was taking me seriously. I had 300 followers. Adults don't want to listen to 15-year-olds and I don't blame them, to be honest. But I was getting really frustrated, because I love football, I love talking about football and I just wanted to air my opinions to as many people as possible."


Sam Gardiner 2 Behind the mask: Sam Gardiner at home in Hampstead. Photograph: Suki Dhanda for the Observer

Gardiner set himself the goal of engaging 50,000 followers, and whatever you think of the morality of it, the tactics he used were smart. Football fans are obsessed with transfer rumours, and the most respected voices – rightly or wrongly – are journalists, who supporters believe have an inside track on any deals going through. So, first as Dominic Jones, until a real writer for Goal alerted Twitter, and then Samuel Rhodes, Gardiner used their made-up credentials and his knowledge of European football to start spreading gossip.

...read more here: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/23/trick-or-tweet-boy-hoax-football-twitter?CMP=fb_gu