The press's shaky grasp on Facebook usually manifests itself in opinions: "It's the new Google" (it's not), "it doesn't have the ad-clog and spam problems that plague MySpace (it does). But this time the French press got the entire story wrong. When the 28-year-old French man unaffiliated with Facebook claimed to be the company's new president in France, the country's press, including L'express and Le Parisien (which later front-paged a retraction), ran with it. Techcrunch.com has the long version, I've got the short version.

When 28-year-old politician Arash Derambarsh joined an unofficial Facebook group called "ePresident," he apparently thought he was running for a real position at the company. He then went to the media, who didn't bother checking the story before introducing him as the country's Facebook president. Which is silly! Facebook would never hire above age 25.

Anyway, French bloggers went nuts, the press retracted, and the Internet once again danced on the corpse of old media, because of course bloggers never get stories wrong.

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