Media outlets fall for fake post on Amartya Sen’s death

On October 10, a purported X (formerly Twitter) account of this year’s Nobel Prize for economics winner Claudia Goldin posted that Indian economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has passed away. Several news outlets like Zee News, Zee Uttar Pradesh, Times Now, Free Press Journal, Firstpost, and Moneycontrol Hindi were quick to publish news reports on this. News agency PTI, too, reported on it, but it has now issued a clarification because as it turns out, the post was by a hoax account (archive here). 

Screenshots of news articles that published the rumour (Source: Zee News/Moneycontrol/Screenshots)

Sen’s daughter, Nandana Sen, took to X and clarified that her father was alive and doing well. She posted a photo of herself, her daughter, and Amartya Sen with the caption, “Friends, thanks for your concern but it’s fake news: Baba is totally fine.” She added that she recently met with her father, who is a professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard University, for a week in Cambridge. Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998 and was awarded the Bharat Ratna in 1999.

What about the post by ‘Claudia Goldin’?

There were several indications that the account that first published the news was not credible. The account was created in May 2023 and had just one post tweet prior to this one, one that announced that the user had joined ‘X.' While the account has now been deleted, a cached version of the post can be viewed here.

Screenshot of the X post by the hoax account (Source: X/Screenshot)

The other posts on this account were reposts from the official account of the Nobel Prize, and interestingly, the Nobel Prize had tagged the author in an earlier post, and the handle of this account was different: ‘PikaGoldin.’ 

A screenshot of the post published by the official handle of Nobel Prize
(Source: X/Screenshot)

In fact, minutes after the X post claiming Sen’s demise went viral, the account said, “This account is hoax created by Italian journalist Tommaso Debenedetti.” An archive can be accessed here.

Screenshot of the post published by the now-deleted fake account of Claudia Holdin (Source: X/Screenshot)

We have reached out to Claudia Goldin for a response, and this article will be updated once we receive a reply. 

Who is Tommaso Debenedetti?

In 2022, a fake account claiming to be of a publishing house had posted that author and Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro had died. This account, too, had later turned out to be a hoax account, “created by Italian journalist Tommasso Debenedetti.”

According to The Guardian, Debenedetti has previously created multiple fake accounts and started hoax rumors about the deaths of famous personalities like Pope and Fidel Castro. Business Insider reported that over the course of ten years, Debenedetti has published over 60 fake interviews with figures like author John Grisham and Gore Vidal in Italian newspapers. He has said that a fake account created by him of ex-German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier fooled Twitter’s old verification process and got verified for a short while. 

Debenedetti claims he publishes such falsehoods to expose how weak the media is. “The Italian press never checks anything, especially if it is close to their political line,” he had told Guardian.

(With inputs from Sanyukta Dharmadhikari and Rajeswari Parasa)

Also read: Why do death hoaxes go viral?