MADRID – French scientist Étienne Klein has caused quite a bit of commotion on Twitter. He presented on the social network where he has more than 91,000 followers the star ‘Proxima Centauri. In reality, it was a photo of a slice of Spanish chorizo. Thousands of followers were so fooled as they blindly shared the photo and the Spanish chorizo star went around the world.
The French scientist then had to apologize for posting the photo of the Spanish chorizo as a joke. However, he hadn’t realized that thousands of followers shared his photo with others, after which the Spanish chorizo star raged across the internet like a comet.
Étienne Klein is a physicist and works at the French nuclear commissariat. The man is seen as a very serious scientist. But on July 31, he shared a colorful photo on his Twitter account of the “Proxima Centauri,” a star closest to the sun at 4.2 million light-years from Earth. The photo, he said, was taken by the James Webb space telescope.
While the Frenchman jokingly shared the photo of the Spanish chorizo, thousands of followers took him seriously and the photo and message were blindly forwarded to other Twitter users. Étienne Klein soon saw that his joke was getting out of hand and had to apologize because the Spanish sausage in the photo only occurs on Earth.
This just goes to show how easy it is to spread fake news, even if a leading scientist shares something. Étienne Klein herself says that you should not take everything too seriously and should always double check everything before believing or sharing something on the internet.
