A Missouri State student wrote up a clever e-mail chain, asking a professor for extra credit. The post went viral, but it was fake.
“I noticed especially with Donald Trump and all the fake news surrounding him, I wanted to provide my teacher with an example she could use in class and also make people laugh,” said Deondre Wallace, the freshman from Kansas City who said creating the e-mails was an experiment.
Wallace caught the attention of tens of thousands of people.
Begging for extra credit like: pic.twitter.com/0Q2KBBQecq
— Deondre Wallace (@Deo_Wallace) December 6, 2016
Stealing a few lines from the Black Eyed Peas song “Where Is The Love?” Wallace begged his communications professor Christine Moore for extra credit.
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In the post, it appears Moore writes back to Wallace, agreeing to give the whole class extra credit.
Wallace’s witty words went viral, and no one bothered to check if the e-mail chain was legitimate.
“I think the problem with it was, the problem with fake news in general, people saw all the retweets favorites and thought it was true because of that and looked over all the clues pointing to the fact that it was fake,” Wallace explained.
His tweet was reposted by several major media sources, including The Daily Mail, Cosmopolitan and Buzzfeed who did so without confirming if the emails were real.
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Missouri State University even reposted it on its Facebook page.
In a statement to 41 Action News, a spokesperson for the University wrote, “This story came up in our media monitoring report. Since it was amusing and our students appreciate amusing stories, we posted it on Facebook. We received a call within the hour from our communications department letting us know it was not a true story. We immediately removed it from our Facebook page. It was a lesson learned for us to confirm the facts before posting an amusing story related to Missouri State academics, especially with ‘fake news’ being such a hot topic.”
Wallace admits his approach was misleading. He wants to apologize to his professor for not alerting her to his plan.
However, he said his experiment, of showing how quickly “fake” news can spread, succeeded.
"I definitely would have included my teacher on it first and maybe not make it as funny so people would actually pick up on the clues that I left that it was fake,” Wallace said.
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Lexi Sutter can be reached at lexi.sutter@kshb.com.
