Let's take a quick trip into the strange world of video game rumors—and see how easy it is for misinformation to spread across the web.
Today, rumors about the next Call of Duty popped up on a website called Bubblews.com. According to the article—posted under the byline "newsoftheday"—the next Call of Duty will be set during World War I, it'll be called "Call of Duty: Patriots," and it'll be out for current-gen systems and PC.
This rumor was linked on the gaming forum NeoGAF, and soon made its way to a number of websites, including the major outlet GameSpot. GameSpot is huge—as of this posting, their article about this rumor has 285 comments and hundreds of shares on Twitter and Facebook. On the official GameSpot Twitter account, the article has more than 400 retweets.
For this Call of Duty rumor, simply clicking on the author's byline reveals that he or she has no other posts on the site—there is no track record here, or reason to believe that any of this is correct. Anyone could have created this account and written this thing. (Of course, there's always an off chance that this might be true, just like there's a chance that your friend's uncle really does work at Nintendo. But nothing to add credence to this post at all.)
Let's take this one step further. It took me roughly two minutes to create an account on Bubblews and write
this post.
So far this ridiculous post has netted my Bubblews account $1.72, and I imagine that number will grow. There is no discernible difference between my post and the Call of Duty one, other than the details being a little sillier.