On January 16, News.am published an article titled “DiCaprio’s chosen one spoke about the worst date with the actor,” where Hollywood actor Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriend, actress Camila Morone, shared about the worst date of her life.

According to the Armenian media, Morone spoke on how the actor once invited her to watch a movie and rented the whole cinema. The couple watched all the films in the “Star Wars” saga, and DiCaprio himself ran around the hall with a lightsaber and pretended to fight the villains. The article also says that the couple had broken up, but there is no confirmation of that.

News.am mentioned Lenta.ru as the source of the material, citing  Le Cinephiles’s Twitter page in the first paragraph.

Let’s start with the fact that Le Cinephiles is a satire page for moviegoers, which is mentioned in their description section. This means that the information about the date of Morone and DiCaprio is just a joke, that is, a fabrication.

Le Cinephiles’ joke has spread, exceeding 300 thousand likes and about 100 thousand retweets. The users of the network also, without getting acquainted with the nature of the page, jumped to conclusions and called Camila Morone ungrateful, which made the creators of the page write the response tweet “may we please direct you to our bio.”

The source of the material translated by News.am, Lenta.ru, wrote about DiCaprio’s date on January 15, becoming one of the big circles spreading misinformation. Now, when reading this news from Lenta.ru, one can first see a note that Le Cinephiles is a satirical page on Twitter, so the news about the worst date is false. The paragraph ends with an apology from the site’s editors to the readers.

As the January 15 screenshots of Wayback Machine show, Lenta.ru did not have that note in the original article.

The first to write about the false news circulating on the Russian Internet was the popular “Dvach” page on Twitter, then Provereno.media covered the fact that, in addition to Lenta, the satire was taken seriously by the website of the Russian fifth channel, RIA “FAN” and others.

Provereno.media also did not hesitate to find out the grounds of the original satire. It turns out that the words are from the interview given by Jonah Hill to W Magazine. Hill says that DiCaprio, during the filming of “Don’t Look Up,” made him watch the “Mandalorian” TV series and a part of the “Star Wars” movie series (more specifically, the spin-off), although Hill does not like science fiction movies. In addition, the separation of DiCaprio and Morone was also a joke from the beginning.

It turns out that Lenta.ru, which is trusted by News.am and has a good reputation, worked wrong with its source of information and, presumably, after checking the widespread facts and finding out the mistake, added a note about the false information, which did not exist at the time. The Armenian news outlet translated the news. News.am, in its turn, didn’t bother to examine the Le Cinephiles bio. This is not the first time that (regardless of geography) the media and readers confuse satirical posts with real news.

Christian Ginosyan