April fool's pranks are sometimes easy to detect as we expect a blitz of them from all angles, but that task proved to be difficult for Google News and presidential hopeful Mitt Romney.
Google's sophisticated aggregation failed to notice a Forbes article, "Romney Drops Out of Race, Endorses Santorum," was a spoof, and had it lead their top breaking- news headlines. Forbes magazine eventually took the prank off its site, moving the article off of Google News' top spot, Mashable reported.
The blog-site Gawker was able to capture a screen-grab of Google's mishap before the article disappeared.
While Mitt Romney has been campaigning for the Presidency for some six years, he might have thought his efforts have been for naught when his campaign staff pranked him on Sunday.
Romney was scheduled to speak at a Milwaukee restaurant on Sunday, but his staff warned him, "We didn't get much of a turnout this morning," Reuters reported.
After the GOP frontrunner was introduced by Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan, Romney appeared before an empty room.
"This is going to look really bad on the evening news," Romney said, according to Reuters.
The audience was in a separate room waiting to hear from Romney, who is likely to win Wisconsin primary on Tuesday.
"This is a morning I'm not going to forget anytime soon," Romney told supporters later. "They turned me into the April fool this morning."
With wire services
This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters recommends: Donate to Wikileaks.
No comments:
Post a Comment