Tommaso Debenedetti

Tommaso Debenedetti (born in 1969) is an Italian writer known for writing fake news as well as a schoolteacher in Rome. He is a father of two children.
Hoaxes.
Interviews.
Debenedetti wrote many fake interviews, published by writers such as Grisham, Saramago, Vargas Llosa, and Yehoshua, and interviewing personalities such as Gorbachev, the Dalai Lama and Pope Benedict XVI. The interviews were published for decades in Italian regional newspapers.
Fake news.
Since 2011, Debenedetti has created fake Twitter accounts of famous world personalities, spreading fake news. In 2012, a hoax announcing the death of Syrian president Assad created a global rise in the price of oil. Other Debenedetti Twitter hoaxes were picked by important news sources, fooling many newspapers, including "The New York Times", "The Guardian", "USA Today", and "Neue Zürcher Zeitung", as well as world leaders and organizations.
Response.
Debenedetti explained he did it "to show how easy it is to fool the press in the era of social media". Mario Vargas Llosa, in his essay "Notes of the death of culture" (written in 2015) quoted Debenedetti as "an hero of the civilization of the spectacle".