Fake Deaths on Twitter
In recent years, many celebrity death psots have been surfacing the internet, most of them on twitter, and most of them fake, however, most hoaxes about celebrity deaths often occur after a real celebrity has died.
Normally when a fake celebrity death occurs, “the cause is from a snowboarding accident, a car accident, or pre-existing health issues,” posted Raneisha Wilkinson, The CelebrityCafe.com
In October 2010, for example, Justin Bieber was declared dead twice in one day on twitter. The singer reportedly died in a car accident.
Millions of tweets hash tagged, “RIP Justin Bieber” circulated the internet; but Bieber seemed to see the funny side of it all and later on tweeted, “Wait – turns out I’m alive.”
Bill Cosby was also victim of celebrity death hoaxes. It was reported on Franchise Herald that, “A nasty rumor began making its rounds on Facebook and Twitter that the comedian had died. It quickly became a trend… interested fans started searching for that online to find out whether it was true or not.”
Cosby was even called in to “Larry King Live” to talk about his death that was originated from the social websites. The 75-year-old said, “I don’t want to do this anymore, because this is my fourth time being reported [dead]. To the people behind this foolishness, I’m not sure you see how upsetting this is,” said Cosby through his own twitter account.
Taylor Swift was a victim of a death hoax around the time of the incident between her and Kanye West, who twitter tried to kill as well shortly after the 2009 MTV Music Awards in a car accident.
Not even Fox news has been left untouched by this phenomenon, declaring President Barack Obama dead at the hands of an assassin. Fortunately, Richard Allen Greene, CNN, reported soon afterwords that “FoxNews.com alerted the Secret Service on Monday about the apparent hacking of its Twitter feed for political news, after the feed was used to falsely report that President Obama was killed.”
“I think that people come up with rumors like this to get people to click on whatever link they have up, which makes it possible for them to upload viruses into your computer,” said Junior Makayla Perkins. “Or they probably want to take you to a page full of online ads and links.
It was reported on Scambusters.org that, “sometimes, individuals or groups who are out to discredit others may use death hoaxes as one of their weapons — as, for instance, when hackers gain control of a news website and post a supposed death story there.”
“People have nothing to do in their spare time but create things like this for attention,” said Sophomore Tabitha McKinley.
In 2009, Yahoo! News reported that Miley Cyrus was killed by truck accident, while on her way to film an episode of her TV show, “Hannah Montana.” Thankfully to millions of her fans, Cyrus is very much alive.
Tom Kenny, the man actor who plays the voice of SpongeBob SquarePants has also been reported dead. However, the claims are untrue, and Kenny is still alive.
The stories escalated from Twitter and Facebook.
McKinley said that, “Most people make up rumors like this because they know that they will gain followers on Twitter for being the first ones to ‘report’ it.”
The good thing is that people are finally stared to get fed up with the rumors, and are now checking all of the facts first before believing anything that is said on the internet. Perkins said, “unless information comes from a pretty legit source, people should not make it a huge deal, since things like this probably hurt the celebrities and their families more than we know.”
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