Nokia Plan B was a hoax

Nokia Plan B was a hoax. The news took the tech industry by storm, but now it's all over, thanks to two tweets on the Nokia Plan B Twitter account:

in case it's not 100% clear by now: #NokiaPlanB is a hoax
there are no 'nine young investors', just one very bored engineer who really likes his iPhone

First, the user fabricated a story about how nine young shareholders wanted to seriously change the current management, which included the expulsion of Nokia CEO Stephen Elop. The supposed group also wanted Nokia to maintain ownership and control of the software layer of its products, a revamp in hiring strategy, the elimination of outdated and bureaucratic R&D practices, and at all cost avoid becoming "a poorly differentiated OEM."

The next day, the fabricated group had reportedly given up. They cited two reasons: by the time their plan even came to fruition, most of the talented software developers at Nokia would already be gone, and the institutional investors who hold most of Nokia stock have told them that their legal fiduciary responsibility bars them from going along with an activist plan.

We were fooled and so was pretty much every other news publication out there. Nobody questioned the story because it made at least some sense: many Nokia shareholders are uneasy about the Microsoft deal.