False Information facts

While investigating facts about False Information, I found out little known, but curios details like:

Two men from Indiana were wrongfully convicted in a 1996 armed robbery because of a false statement from an informant who had sex with the lead detective who set them up. 20 years later, they were found innocent and one of them received $4.9 Million settlement.

'Gaslighting' is a form of psychological torture where false, misleading and/ or contradicitng information is given to a subject to cause them to doubt their own sanity.

In my opinion, it is useful to put together a list of the most interesting details from trusted sources that I've come across. Here are 32 of the best facts about False Information I managed to collect.

1. The "fact" that you eat 8 spiders a year was a social experiment to show how fast false information spreads on the internet

2. Alexis von Roenne, one of Hitler's most trusted intelligence analysts who secretly despised Hitler and knowingly gave him false information in order to assist the Allies. His actions are believed to have saved thousands of Allied lives.

3. During WW2 a Spanish man convinced the Nazis that he was a spy living in London, and fed them false information. This grew to him working for Britain with captured spies, creating a fictional network of other spies, and being awarded a medal from both Britain AND Nazi Germany.

4. The husband of the richest woman in Germany (heir to 12.5% of BMW) was not informed of her true identity until "the romance was solid." She also worked as an apprentice in a BMW factory under a false name.

5. When a man named Paul Bennewitz had discovered a 'secret alien base' through radio signals that actually turned out to be secret government flight tests, the US government decided to throw him off by sending an agent to feed him false information, urging him to pursue his UFO fantasy.

6. About the illusory truth effect: the tendency to believe false information to be correct after repeated exposure. A repeated statement is easier to process than a new, unrepeated statement, which leads people to think that the repeated one is more truthful.

7. False copies of the game Cross Days were spread on the internet and contained a virus that would ask the user for personal information before posting their browsing history to a blog. The user could have it removed if they admitted to pirating. The virus was outlined in the false game’s TOS.

8. A 22 year old man siphoned over $50,000 from several online brokerage firms using only the micro-deposits sent when verifying a new account. While technically not illegal, he was indicted for fraud for using false information when setting up the fake accounts.

9. Henry Faulds wrote to Charles Darwin about the potential importance of fingerprinting in the criminal justice system, "but, too old and ill to work on it, Darwin gave the information to his cousin, Francis Galton," who "calculated that the chance of a 'false positive' was about 1 in 64 billion."

What is true about false information?

You can easily fact check it by examining the linked well-known sources.

During WW2 British intelligence officers dressed the body of a dead tramp as an officer, planted false information about an invasion on his body and released it off the coast of Spain, all in order to misdirect the German forces

Joan Paul Garcia was a successful double agent in WW2 who helped to pull off d-day by creating a fictional spy network to trick the nazis into believing false information. MI5 helped him to fake his death after WW2. - source

The flourescent lamp wasn't invented by a Filipino inventor, Agapito Flores, and it was just a myth. Majority of Filipinos are educated by this false information because it was published in a lot of text books for public schools and the "proof" was his last name Flores. - source

Broadcasting false information is against the law in Canada

Snopes has an entire section of false "facts" noted as true: The Repository Of Lost Legends (TROLL). They include it to demonstrate the pitfall of False Authority: "No single truth purveyor, no matter how reliable, should be considered an infallible font of accurate information." - source

After Hurricane Andrew struck South Florida, several monkeys that escape a research lab were shot by people after false information spread that the monkeys were infected with AIDS.

Mickey Featherstone, a former Irish American Mobster from Hell's Kitchen who became an informant after being falsely convicted of murder, was circumcised by his friends during the Vietnam War in a drunken prank

Operation Mincemeat, a plan by the British to give the Nazis false information by attaching fake top secret documents to a cadaver dressed as a military officer

Alma Mahler, wife of Gustav Mahler, published a memoir about her life with Gustav but the memoir contain so much false, misleading information but people for many years believe it. This is call the Alma Problem.

The fact that "the 'fact' that you eat 8 spiders a year was a social experiment to show how fast false information spreads on the web" was a social experiment to show how fast false information spreads on the internet

In 2014 the CIA was caught spying on the committee that regulates them. They also sent a criminal referral to the department of justice based on false information.