‘Screwy’ Apple rumour goes viral, revealed to be a hoax

On Monday, Swedish design company Day4 revealed that a recent Apple rumour incurring the wrath of technology bloggers everywhere was just a hoax invented to prove a point about false information online.

Unlike most hoaxes, this one was covered by reputable outlets and not just enthusiastic tweeters. Now writers must scramble to offer apologies, corrections and humble promises to be more discerning next time, the Huffington Post reports.

Day4's Lukasz Lindell explains everything on the company website.

Essentially, the design team wanted to test "how easy it is to spread disinformation" on the Internet, and opted to use Apple fans as their test community for spreading a lie.

Day 4 created a 3D image of a screw, then anonymously posted that image, from an apparent screenshot of a confidential email, to Reddit with the following text:

"A friend took a photo a while ago at that fruit company, they are obviously even creating their own screws."

See the image here.

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Within 12 hours, headlines started popping up:

"Apple May Be Working On A Top Secret Asymmetric Screw To Lock You Out Of Your Devices Forever," the Apple blog Cult of Mac announced.

Wired UK, Softpedia and Macworld also jumped on the story. People ranted about the screws on Twitter and YouTube.

"We had thus managed to get the rumour going, Apple is possibly to invent a new kind of screw to shut out people from opening their Apple products," Lindell wrote.

Apple has already received plenty of criticism about their repair-unfriendly products. The fake screw only further angered consumers, as products would be impossible to tamper with or repair using existing tools.

Apple users and repair shops alike would be "screwed."

Lindell noted that reporters and bloggers were careful to report that the "Apple screw" was just an unconfirmed vague rumour:

"My gut feel is that this isn't from Apple," iFixit co-founder Kyle Wiens told Wired. "The threads are unrealistic, and I suspect that a head like that is too complex to use as a tool head. Existing tool designs tend to be simple because the head needs to withstand a fair amount of torque."

While technology blogs encouraged doubt and critical thought, readers' discussions, however, had no room for a grey zone. Either the news was 100 per cent true, an assumption on which 90 per cent of commenters based their opinions and criticisms, or the image was a fake.

Day4 found that the greater the distance from the source of the story — disgruntled Apple fans' opinions and conclusions posted on Facebook and Google+, for example — the greater the perceived level of truth.

"We must become more critical of what we read and think 'Is this reasonable?' or 'What's the origin for this information?' Because it is not the last time any of this data will be upon us," Lindell wrote.

"Finally, we just want to say sorry to you who feel cheated, but the meaning behind the experiment may provide a longer-term results, that we become more thoughtful about things we see on the Internet."

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