Last time we checked, we thought TechCrunch, the wildly popular tech blog, wasn’t taking embargoes. Or they were, sometimes. In fact, their policy was pretty unclear, and could basically summed up as: it depends.

Exhibit A is a tweet last night from TechCrunch reporter Jason Kincaid:

Tech press, I invite you all to raise your collective middle finger toward eWeek for botching the Gmail embargo.

Google was set to announce a new feature to Gmail, and had what seems like most of the major players lined up with their embargo of the news.

Then, eWeek’s Clint Boulton had his story go live, in advance of the embargo, leading everyone to scramble.

It’s unclear right now if Boulton’s move was intentional, but this leads us back to our original question: does TechCrunch take embargoed news?

It looks like Facebook PR is getting sick of bloggers and reporters who don’t call them to fact check before writing stories, specifically the popular blog TechCrunch. In a post late yesterday, titled “Yeah Ok, So Facebook Punk’d Us,” editor Michael Arrington lays out how TechCrunch reporter Jason Kincaid fell for a Facebook PR prank.

Long story short, Facebook added a fake feature, “Fax This Photo” below all pictures, that only TechCrunch employees could see. Noticing the new feature, Kincaid emailed Facebook for comment. When he didn’t hear back from them after 25-minutes, he posted: “Facebook Now Lets You Fax Your Photos. I Have No Idea Why Anyone Would Want To Do This.”

Of course, about an hour later, Facebook PR confirmed the hoax to Kincaid, which was then followed by the update post by Arrington. Would something like this fly with The New York Times? Definitely not, as The Business Insider’s Nicholas Carlson pointed out (see comments). However, was it a funny way to remind TechCrunch to call sources before posting? Yes.

[image via TechCrunch]