“I am rocket scientist with NASA.”

Man fools an entire nation into thinking he’s the next top scientist at NASA, but is he entirely to blame?

Read this from BusinessInsider.Com: Man Tricked India Into Thinking He Had Been Recruited By NASA

In short, Arun P. Vijayakumar, a 27-year-old from Kerala, India, declared on Facebook that he had been selected to join NASA and as it turns out, was even interviewed by The Hindu and celebrated as a local hero of sorts.

Of course, Vijayakumar’s bluff was soon called off by netizens, and that about puts an end to India’s best hope at a supposed-MIT scholar finding signs of extraterrestrial lifeforms with the US space agency.

Or does it end there? Should it?

Because it makes me wonder about just how easy it is for anyone to create a fake identity and pull up all sorts of elaborate scams in this digital age: the more connected and obsessed with “what’s trending” on social media we are, the more susceptible we become to unwittingly allowing mis-information to proliferate in our midst.

The problem is that social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram have become so successful at what they do that they have replaced traditional media as as authentic (albeit unvalidated)sources of news for today’s Millennials. With “disruptive” news sites like EliteDaily and Mic.Com seeking to redefine what makes the news, we are, more than ever, swarmed with information that, to be very honest, makes it almost impossible to keep track of what’s credible or not. And the speed at which both information and misinformation travels these days through the simple click of a “Like” or “Share” button, what makes an event newsworthy is no longer about how credible it is, but rather, how many Likes and Shares it’s garnered within the first hour of its broadcast.

In other words, What’s Trending is now the news. We could have polar bears dying from heat stroke because of an increase in temperature in the arctic regions, that’s not going to matter more than how Renee Zellweger looked like at an ELLE magazine event, because people are more interested (or repulsed, whichever way you looked at it) at how a Hollywood star should look like instead of a couple of grizzly white furballs dying from a suntan.

“It’s Indian news…”

A friend of mine posed this question on his Facebook account in response to news of Vijayakumar’s little escapade on the World Wide Web: “How could this happen? Wouldn’t the journalist who covered the story have done his due diligence?”, to which someone replied, quite matter-of-factly, “It’s Indian news.”

As if to say it’s expected, and hence it concludes there.

But I’d like to point out that it’s not only the Indian newspaper that’s been guilty of slipshod journalism: some of you may recall that some time ago, there was a viral post on social media about people developing “skin conditions” after using certain brands of soap and shampoo, only to be exposed later as lotus seed pods photoshopped onto human body parts.

The thing is: that hoax actually found its way to some mainstream media news sites before it was exposed as little more than clever digital-editing, that is, if you can call it that.

Can you really blame the Indian news media for jumping onto the bandwagon and interviewing Vijayakumar, thereby elevating the 27-year-old to national hero status?

Let’s face it — newspapers need to sell stories, and the more sensational the news, the more revenue it translates to. And given how much and how quickly the “news” becomes the olds these days, there is pressure on journalists and news wires to churn out stories that sell quickly.

In success-hungry India, Arun Vijayakumar sold the news an opportunity to sell a sensational story: unknown boy from some nondescript neighborhood in Kerala who made it big at a premier university in the West, and being identified to be a big name in space exploration, thus thrusting India into the limelight…which of course, as it was later revealed, turns out to be utter tabloid trash, even though by then, it had caught the attention of millions of Indians on social networks.

Vijayakumar’s story isn’t the only one that exposes the lack of depth in journalism and reporting the news in the fast-moving digital age: there is simply not enough time to investigate a story in depth — get the headlines (that sell) out first, and we worry about its validity later on.

And if the story turns out to be a fake, it’s another hot-selling headline you can capitalize on. No need for apologies, no need for correctums, just run a story along the lines of “Man who claims to be hired by NASA is a con-artist.”

Gain instant fame in a couple of keystrokes

It’s not difficult to gain instant fame (or notoriety) these days if you understand how social media works: get onto your chosen social network of choice (say Twitter), create a profile, pretend to be anyone you want to be, imagined or otherwise, and start tweeting away on your fake profile, and add “People you may know”. Do that enough times, and you can pretty much spin a story around your identity. The less savvy folks even have an option to pay people on Fiverr.Com to do anything from create attention-grabbing covers for their social sites to getting more “Likes” and traffic to your profile.

In an August 2012 article, CNN reported ‘83 million Facebook accounts are fakes and dupes’ (read the article here), and in a related article, ‘Facebook inspires status envy’. Whether or not one was setting up a fake account as part of an elaborate money-making scam, or simply to re-invent your personality and branding, or as an April Fools’ prank, one thing is clear: one’s credibility these days goes down to how much interest your profile can generate, and how many Likes and Shares you can garner.

Even more amazing is that there are hiring managers and recruiters who validate job applicants and candidates based on their LinkedIn profiles. Amazing as it sounds, it only shows just how reliant people have become on information via social sites, and they’d believe just about everything they read on the Internet. Any wonder then that in June 2014, the Australian Financial Review ran an article entitled Fake CVs are on the rise where the managing director of a recruitment consulting firm opinioned that “LinkedIn endorsement feature lacked weight and credibility compared with real references.”

Who can blame Arun Vijayakumar for trying? At least he got his moment of fame before the shame, and in a couple of weeks, all will be forgotten. But at least now he can add another qualification to his CV: professional social media spin-doctor, and no one can say he’s wrong.