Billionaire offers stern correction – it's getting hard to know what's a spoof these days – Telegraph Blogs

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Richard Preston

Richard Preston is an Assistant Editor of The Daily Telegraph. He has been the paper's features editor, news editor and comment editor.

Billionaire offers stern correction – it's getting hard to know what's a spoof these days

Would you like to correct that, Ma'am? Sir David Tang at the Palace

Would you like to correct that, Ma'am? Sir David Tang at the Palace

Sir David Tang, entrepreneur and founder of luxury retailer Shanghai Tang, has set up a website called icorrect.com where his fellow celebrities can post corrections to untruths about themselves that are circulating in the meeja. So far, Sienna Miller has been on to point out that anyone tweeting under her name isn't her; Kate Moss doesn't do Twitter, plus she's not on Facebook either, thank you very much; nor is Tom Parker Bowles; and Dasha Zhukova (a Russian 'philanthropist, entrepreneur, model, fashion designer and magazine editor' m'lud, at least according to her Wikipedia entry, which she may want to correct) has not joined Twitter either – 'yet'. That's ominous.

If it goes on like this, all the other celebs are going to realise how terrifyingly uncool it is to tweet and will be closing their accounts in droves. People like … oh, here's Stephen Fry correcting something he saw in the Spectator that suggested he doesn't like Catholics: 'This repulsive slur, that I dislike catholics, is deeply unfair and unkind….' Trouble is, unlike his tweets, this bleat goes on for days. And here's Naomi Campbell telling us 'I have never ever expressed any opinion either way about whether FIFA made the right choice for where the 2018 World Cup should be held…' Who knew? Cue a lengthy essay.

Somewhere in all this cocktail party chatter is a semi-serious idea. Lots of untruths circulate on the internet and it's hard to correct them. And rich people often decide they're going to use the UK's hopelessly lopsided libel laws to get their way. If posting a correction with David Tang begins to cure them of that affliction, he'll have performed a useful service.

But really, what chance has he got of these shouts being heard above the barrage of the internet din? Why would anyone come to his site to check things? Well, they won't, but it could quickly become a cultish read for those who enjoy seeing the usual gang of celeb suspects puffing themselves up and airing grievances. And don't worry about any riff-raff appearing – like, you know, common people whose lives may have been destroyed by tabloid reporting. Sir David's absolute masterstroke is that he's charging his pals $1,000 a year for the right to use the site. Wiki-ching! So that's how you get rich.

By the way, I've blithely referred to Sir David Tang as a billionaire in the above headline because I didn't want to insult him by calling him a millionaire. But if I'm wrong, I'll look forward to reading his correction.

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