27.12.2018 в 13:57

Meet the Mastermind Behind the Fake Atlas Obscura Twitter Account

Author: Evan Nicole Brown / Source: Atlas Obscura

If there’s one thing you should probably do before 2018 ends, it’s follow @notatlasobscura on Twitter. It’s a fake Atlas Obscura Twitter account, equal parts parody and creative gold mine, that makes for a perfect pairing with the official one.

This mysterious profile, supposedly operated by “a secret society founded by Millard Fillmore,” has been generating clever, untrue tweets since January 2017.

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Apparently, Mexico City’s surreal, almost unbelievable Island of the Dolls is the place entry on our site that got Millard, as we’ll call him, thinking: “it wouldn’t be too hard to make something like that up.” So, he started making stuff like that up.

Though @notatlasobscura replicates much of the tone of our content, none of the things Millard posts are real. While we write about the obscure, yet accessible wonders of our world, Fake Atlas Obscura makes the unreal seem true. Somehow, he’s figured out how to straddle sensationalism and authenticity just so, and our timelines are all the better for it. “I want to make it clear that I’m coming up with the stuff myself,” Millard tells me. In fact, he’s so cautious about not stepping on our toes, that he combs through the site daily to make sure he’s not tweeting anything similar to what we’ve published recently.

Millard is such a convincing Atlas Obscura tweeter that the team here at real @atlasobscura has lost sleep over his identity. Is he one of us? Or an ex-employee? Or someone’s spouse?! (Surprisingly, he tells me that only one person has ever DM’d him asking who he is.) Via direct messages, I tried to break him down: Have you ever been on an Atlas Obscura trip? “No.” What’s your favorite place in the Atlas? “The isolated, abandoned ones.” I got nothing. Luckily, though, he agreed to a more formal Q&A, and his answers felt convincing, though said with a wink—much like his tweets. But don’t take my word for it! Keep reading and follow @notatlasobscura to see for yourself.