The Microsoft Buys the Church Hoax — a joke press release became the first viral fake news

In early December 1994, an anonymous document began circulating on the young internet in the form of an Associated Press wire story datelined “VATICAN CITY (AP).” It announced that the Microsoft Corporation would acquire the Roman Catholic Church in exchange for an unspecified number of shares of Microsoft common stock — that Pope John Paul II would become a senior vice president of a new Religious Software Division, that the faithful would soon receive sacraments such as Communion and confession through their computers, and that converting to Catholicism would amount to an “upgrade.” The Associated Press had written no such story. The release was a satire, authorship unknown, and Microsoft would publicly debunk it on December 16, 1994.

The piece was studded with tells that should have stopped a careful reader: the absurdity of buying a two-thousand-year-old church for stock, a quote attributed to Bill Gates promising to make religion “easier and more fun for a broader range of people,” and a revived plan to sell indulgences online. Yet it spread with unprecedented speed for its moment. Forwarded by email, reposted to Usenet newsgroups, and relayed through listservs, it reached thousands of machines within hours and is widely regarded as the first internet hoax to reach a genuine mass audience. The talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, then a CompuServe user, read it aloud on his nationally syndicated television program, and Microsoft began fielding calls — some from people who were angry, some from people who simply wanted to know if it was true.

What gave the document its traction was the costume of legitimacy it wore. It did not present itself as a joke posted to a humor group; it presented itself as Associated Press copy, the bare wire format that newsrooms and readers alike treat as fact by default. The format stripped away the cues of authorship and intent, so that a satire built to be obviously preposterous arrived looking like syndicated news that had merely been forwarded. The medium added nothing to authenticate it and everything to accelerate it.

Microsoft, unusually, responded with a formal statement — a rarity for a company asked to deny a joke. On December 16 it issued an electronic release clarifying that the story had no truth and was not generated by the company, and the Associated Press confirmed it had originated and distributed no such wire. The episode left no victims and cost no one money, but it became a founding parable of online misinformation: proof that a fabrication wearing a trusted institution’s format could outrun its own absurdity across a network with no gatekeepers, and that the new medium’s power to distribute information was inseparable from its power to distribute nonsense.