Our ‘facts’ are now shaped by our social and political affiliation. Where is before we could all agree on certain facts and debate about our interpretation of them, we now cannot even agree on the facts themselves. The facts of climate change are clouded by the politicalization of the issue which is split along Republican and Democratic lines. This number hasn’t changed significantly since the 90's despite an increasing amount of available information - both research and weather patterns. Yet the polls show that only 63% of Americans believe climate change is real. 97 percent of scientists agree that climate change is happening, and 95 percent of scientists believe that humans are the dominant cause. While there is more information available online than ever before, we are less willing to use it to form our opinions and instead increasingly rely on herd mentality propagated by our feeds.Ī good example of this is Climate Change. As a result our perception of what is fact has become highly personalised, politicised, and malleable. On top of all this, our social feeds are personalised to give us what the algorithms presumes we will ‘like’. We are all willing to let our guard down at first sight of familiar branding of a reputable source. The average internet user doesn't question or cross-check the information presented to them. Clone Zone is a vivid example of how easily false facts can be created and distributed with the help of social media feeds.
#Free clone tool online password#
Clone Zone is in closed beta at the moment, but check for the beta password at the end of the post if you want to try it out for yourself.Īlthough it’s really fun to clone websites and and have everyone believe your version of reality, it’s also a little bit scary. So if you want to have your picture in the New York times you can chose an existing NYTimes article, add your picture, edit the headline and text and voila! You're famous… at least within your group of friends that fall for the clone. It lets you clone any web page on the internet, edit any text and images on the page and share the result on social media. But more importantly it reaffirmed our company’s reasoning behind making the app.Ĭlone Zone is an online tool we made at 4REAL as an art project. Of course we were psyched about the fact that Clone Zone worked so well, spreading like wildfire form share to share. Apparently their initial concern about not being hyper-linked properly escalated to a discussion about the necessity to acquire the new competitor - Clone Zone the startup. Turns out the article was even passed around the Genius office, a real and well-funded startup who we mentioned in the TechCrunch article. Even with the Clone Zone logo at the bottom of the clone and the not-so-conspicuous url, a majority of our friends and family fell for it. Whenever we go out to a social event we inevitably end up having to explain to someone that no, we are not rolling in dough and can't actually afford to buy a bottle of Cristal for everyone. Even two weeks later we are still getting congratulated on our ‘million dollar success’. The fake article turned out to be more believable than we ever anticipated with likes and reposts rollin in right away. We giddily shared the clone’s url on facebook and twitter. Thats my co-founder and I in the pic above, closing $1.8m seed round lead by Andreessen Horowitz. After a few quick edits with the Clone Zone, we had a believable post about Clone Zone ‘the startup’. We decided on this article from TechCrunch about a recently funded startup. Naturally we went on a search for a juicy website to clone. Our web tool, Clone Zone which lets users clone any website online and edits its content, wasn't quite ready for official launch, yet April 1st was the time to put it to the test. A Website Cloning Tool and the Problem of Personalized “Fact”.Īpril Fools was the perfect day to do this.
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