SMALL PRINT:STEPHEN FRY doesn't hate Catholics, Cherie Blair is not going to appear on Strictly Come Dancingthis year and Kate Moss doesn't have a Twitter account so ignore any of her tweets – they're written by an impostor.
We know all this because we got it on a growing new website called iCorrect (icorrect.com). The site says it can “permanently correct any lies, misinformation and misrepresentations that permeate in cyberspace”. So if you feel lies, half-truths, gossip and rumour are being spread about you in either old or new media, all you have to do is register at iCorrect, pay the annual $1,000 registration fee and get correcting.
Only a few weeks old, thus far iCorrect has mainly attracted celebrities and politicians but its founder hopes the “man in the street” will soon be persuaded of the benefits of setting the record straight. Having Fry on board has helped the site’s profile but the most enthusiastic user so far appears to be Cherie Blair, who has pulled up several UK papers for what she says are inaccuracies in their reportage of her.
Set up by the “entrepreneur and socialite” Sir David Tang after his famous friends were constantly complaining to him that they were being impersonated on Twitter or that their Wikipedia entry was full of untruths, he justifies the rather steep yearly charge by saying he doesn’t want to carry advertising.
“About 90 per cent of what’s out there in cyberspace is hearsay or lies or opinion,” claims Tang. “This new site gives a platform to people who don’t want to go to court to defend their reputations.”
When you sign up to iCorrect you get your own personalised code which allows you access your page and you can correct away to your heart’s content. Typically a user posts up the offending newspaper article alongside their “correction”.
But celebrities don’t always post the truth either. iCorrect users can post whatever they want in their correction as long as it is not libellous or an incitement to crime. iCorrect makes “no guarantee regarding the reliability, accuracy, legitimacy or quality of such postings”.
iCorrect is not all about current news. Michael Caine, below, has obviously been nursing a grudge for the past 40 years that the phrase “Not many people know that” is always attributed to him. He took to the site to write “I have never said ‘Not many people know that’. Peter Sellers said it when he impersonated my voice on his telephone answering machine.
“His impersonation was: ‘This is Michael Caine, Peter Sellers is out. Not many people know that’.”
To which one can only reply: Not a lot of people know that Michael Caine never said “Not a lot of people know that”.
