Sorry, everyone - the story of a 15-year-old Kentucky teen tweeting from a smart fridge is almost certainly a hoax
- The saga of a 15-year-old Kentucky teen named Dorothy who just wanted to tweet went viral this week.
- In a series of tweets, Dorothy adopts increasingly strange devices to access Twitter - from a Nintendo 3DS, to a Nintendo Wii U, to an LG Smart Refrigerator - as revealed by the tweets' source tags.
- It's a concise illustration of how silly the modern world of "smart" electronics has become, where a refrigerator is used for Twitter.
- It turns out that the story could be too good to be true, as Buzzfeed demonstrated how easy it is to fake source tags and confirmed that no LG refrigerator has Twitter functionality.
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Dorothy just wanted to use Twitter on her summer break from high school.
As a bored 15-year-old Kentucky teen, she turned to Twitter to occupy her free time. "I've been bored all summer and Twitter passes the time for me," she told New York Magazine in an interview over Twitter DM.
But her mother wanted to stop that, and, in a harrowing series of tweets, Dorothy bounces from device to device in an attempt to stay connected to Twitter.
At first, she appears to move to the Nintendo 3DS (the hashtag "#ACNL" is a reference to the game "Animal Crossing: New Leaf").
Then, in a gripping twist, her mother seemingly discovers she's been tweeting from the 3DS and puts it to a stop:
Dorothy then jumps to the Nintendo Wii U and, wilder still, to an LG smart refrigerator. A smart refrigerator? For Twitter? Madness.
It was a near-perfect illustration of how silly our "smart" future has become, where teens are driven from smartphones to game consoles to refrigerators. It was so near-perfect, in fact, that it was almost certainly a hoax.
The entire basis of the story is Twitter's source tags, which identify what device a tweet originated on.
But, as Buzzfeed points out, those source tags are easily faked - a set of instructions on Reddit walks through the process right here.
Perhaps even more importantly, there are no LG refrigerators with Twitter functionality. A spokesperson for LG confirmed as much to Buzzfeed.
While the various LG "smart" refrigerators do have internet connectivity, and some even have web browsers, there is no Twitter app for any refrigerator - and thus, no way for the source of the tweets to be "LG Smart Refrigerator."
Another red flag: The various interviews conducted with "Dorothy" by New York Magazine and The Guardian were somehow conducted via Twitter Direct Message.
In the interview with The Guardian, she said she was able to speak over Twitter DM through her cousin's iPad; in the interview with New York Magazine, she said it was through her cousin's iPod that was said to be running out of battery and "on its last legs."
While it's not completely clear this is a hoax, or whether the 15-year-old Kentucky girl named Dorothy even exists, one thing is clear: No one is tweeting from smart refrigerators.