The man behind the Pakistan-based website where details of the non-existent Halloween parade through Dublin city centre first appeared has apologised to everyone who showed up.
He insisted that it was not a hoax but a mistake that led to the misinformation being widely circulated in the days leading up to October 31st.
Thousands of people lined O’Connell Street on Thursday evening expecting a parade and only started to disperse after gardaí and other sources confirmed it was not happening. They had showed up because of a post which first appeared on a website called myspirithalloween.com.
The site carries listings of hundreds of events from across the world and is written by a team of content creators working remotely in various countries.
It featured prominently in Google results in the run-up to October 31st and was seen by many people in business, with the promise of a Dublin parade widely shared across multiple social media platforms by individuals and businesses in the area.
It was, however, not to be.
At 8pm, an hour after the “parade” was due to start, a Garda social media post confirmed no such event was happening and asked people to disperse.
Speaking to The Irish Times, the man behind the website, who identified himself as Nazir Ali, said that it was not his or his business’s intention to mislead people and he expressed concern that multiple reports suggested it was a hoax when it fact it was a genuine mistake.
He said there were more than 1,400 articles on the site, the vast majority of which accurately detail Halloween-themed events happening all over the world.
“It was our mistake and we should have doubled checked it to make sure it was happening. But newspapers are reporting that we posted it intentionally and this is very, very wrong,” he said.
He pointed out that his sites have carried information about various events in Ireland including many St Patrick’s Day events and he has never had any reports of mistakes.
What appears to have happened, he said, is that one of his team had searched for events happening in Dublin and found reference to a previous Halloween parade. They had assumed the event would also be happening this year and then cut and pasted details from another site.
Mr Ali said that he had “not got any information about the parade before last night. If we had heard before the day that the parade was not going to happen we would have removed it but no one alerted us.”
He noted that the site was among the top ranked Halloween-themed sites on Google and “this was the only article that was bogus”.
He also stressed that no one including the author of the post would benefit from this post. “It was a mistake. Do you think we would do all this SEO for a joke?”
“We are highly embarrassed and highly depressed, and very sorry,” he said and reiterated that the website or the post was not a scam or a hoax one which ended up bringing thousands of people into the city on Thursday night.
A Garda spokesman confirmed that it was not investigating the issue as “no criminal offences were disclosed”. He said Garda advise was for the public to “always verify any information online regarding upcoming events from trusted and reputable sources”.