The Online Journalists Who Didn't Exist

Don't try to connect with News Hawks journalists Mike Adams, Charles Lindy, Kara Degete, and Hannah Grimm on LinkedIn -- they don't really exist. The editor-in-chief of the online news site, Ruth Gramma, also doesn't exist. They have impressive resumes, though, even great head-shots. Check out Mike Adams:

This photo was later identified as a stock image used on sites like deviantART, and later traced to Flickr.

According to this LA Times article, this elaborately fake staff was allegedly created by a PR consultant to plant flattering stories in Google News regarding a CA water wholesaler:

"There seemed to be no doubt that Mike Adams was a productive journalist, even if his beat was a bit obscure: the Central Basin Municipal Water District.

In recent months, he churned out more than 20 stories on the water wholesaler based in southeast Los Angeles. He wrote about recycled water that kept the grass green on street medians and parks. About the computer system a college used to irrigate its landscaping. About a water-saving youth soccer field.

The only mystery, really, was Adams himself. The Times could not find evidence he exists."

It shouldn't be surprising that this sort of thing exists -- I mean, look how easy it is to fake a profile on Twitter or chatrooms or whatnot. In fact, convincing dupes of popular websites like Google are created all the time, accessible if you accidentally misspell the URL by a letter or two. These techniques can be used for everything from "gaming" Google with fake articles to smearing a political candidate with a realistic but bogus "official" site.

I think you can get really tripped up by these using these stock photos, though. I mean, here are image matcher Tin Eye's results for a search on the "Mike Adams" pic. He's a very compelling-looking dude, I'll give him that -- you can really picture him on the scene, the brim of his cowboy hat pulled low, covering water wholesaling topics.