Man who posted false information online says it was meant as joke
The man who posted false information on an online encyclopedia linking a prominent Nashville journalist to the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy says he was trying to play a trick on a co-worker.
Brian Chase, 38, said he never imagined his actions would cause pain and didn’t know that the free Internet encyclopedia called Wikipedia was used as a serious reference tool.
Chase, who resigned from his job as an operations manager at a Nashville delivery company as a result of the debacle, hand-delivered an apology to John Seigenthaler Sr., the former Tennessean publisher and editor and founding editorial director of USA Today. The two spoke on the phone Friday night.
“I knew from the news that Mr. Seigenthaler was looking for who did it, and I did it so I needed to let him know in particular that it wasn’t anyone out to get him, that it was done as a joke that went horribly, horribly wrong,” Chase said.
Chase said he created a fake online biography of Seigenthaler in May as a gag to shock a co-worker, who was familiar with the Seigenthaler family.
The biography, which has since been replaced, said that Seigenthaler had lived in the Soviet Union, started a successful public relations firm and was linked to the Kennedy assassinations.
Seigenthaler said Chase’s original note had been changed several times since May, adding vulgar epithets. The entry motivated Seigenthaler to write an op-ed piece blasting Wikipedia’s credibility that was published in USA Today.
Seigenthaler, who founded the First Amendment Center, said he doesn’t plan to pursue legal action against Chase but said the experience has left him hurt.
“I was a close friend of Robert Kennedy, and I worked closely with the president,” he said. “I had lived with Robert Kennedy and helped edit his first book. We were close friends until his death, and the most painful thing was to have them suggest that I was suspected of their assassination.
“I do not favor more regulations of the Internet, but I fear that Wikipedia is inviting it by its allowing irresponsible vandals to write anything they want about anybody.”
The incident spurred questions about the reliability of information on Wikipedia and the Internet, and how those wrongly portrayed can hold Web sites accountable, especially when access is unrestricted.
While Seigenthaler tried to track down the author of the biography through Wikipedia’s creator and the author’s IP address, a unique number assigned to a computer connected to the Internet, a man in Texas was doing the same.
Daniel Brandt of San Antonio traced the biography author’s computer to BellSouth Internet Services provider in Nashville and later to local courier firm Rush Delivery, where Chase was employed.
“When Seigenthaler’s case came along, I was instantly sympathetic,” said Brandt, who has fought Wikipedia to remove an unflattering biography of himself.