Shoutouts to tobr [2] who noticed - and rurban who posted similarly [3].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25485651
Plus, Wikipedia links to an archived CERN page (read: not vandalized) that reports in a timeline widget that the first web server went live at CERN on December 20, 1990. So, through lack of research, this attempt at misinformation wasn’t actually spreading a complete untruth.
"I wanted to see how many people would..."
This is what every researcher says to themselves and is exactly why real researchers at real research institutes are subject to human subjects IRB reviews.
Regarding designing or using sociotechical systems like Twitter, see Brown et al. (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2858036.2858313) for good discussion and provocations on why this is the case.
Any real IRB board would see that this research clearly contains potential harmful outcomes to participants as a result of making public examples of them for the researcher's amusement. No ethical researcher "publishes" results without some attempt to shield the identities of the subjects. Sure, sometimes they screw that up, but revealing the identities of "researched stooges" seems to have been the primary intent here.
I must obtain IRB approval to conduct any research, even show people simple web/social content. Sometimes it is fast tracked for sure, but EVERYTHING that involves human subjects goes through IRB review at every institute/university I have ever worked with.
