The recent tragic deaths of Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, and, now, Billie Mays, must have inspired a few obituary writers on June 25th. That’s because several fake death notices were released including famous stars such as Matt Damon, Jeff Goldblum and Harrison Ford.
Furthermore, earlier this morning, fake reports of celebrity deaths of Miley Cyrus, Britney Spears, and Bruce Willis were rampant on the internet, prompting the names of those celebrities to pop up on Google trends.
These inappropriately timed rumors are clearly false and widely know internet pranks that were also attributed to the fake death reports of Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise.
Jeff Goldblum’s publicist assured America in a statement later that day June 25th, that the death notice was “completely untrue” adding that he was “fine and in Los Angeles.” What a relief and good to know!
Snopes.com reports that the death pranks are being generated automatically by prank websites using phony circumstances to complete the story.
All users must do is type in the actor/actress’s name such as “Jurassic Park’s” Jeff Goldblum or “Indiana Jones’” Harrison Ford.
Goldblum’s fake internet obituary suggested he had taken a deadly fall off of a cliff during the filming of his latest movie in New Zealand. It was also falsely reported that Ford had gone missing after traveling on his yacht in the French Riviera.
The stories were both rather unlikely because both actors were currently working together on their upcoming film Morning Glory in New York, this week with costars Diane Keaton and Rachel McAdams.
Internet death hoaxes are nothing new, of course. One particular internet death pranks in 2006 involved Tom Hanks as the victim.
But as far as the recent wave of celebrity death hoaxes are concerned, Twitter was behind the spreading of false death rumors this past Thursday. Just as many celebrities are not really on Twitter, they are not really dead either!
Twitterers reported the deaths of Goldblum, Ford, as well as Matt Damon, who supposedly died in a plane crash that afternoon. Well, a plane crash or a car crash, depending on which Twitterer you were following.
Twitter’s management has recently been cracking down on the problem with false celebrity twittering. Now it looks like they have another problem to deal with, fact-checking tweets. Looks like Twitter is doing as much as it can toward working the kinks out of the social networking website.
The Museum of Hoaxes lists several other celebrities who have endured death hoaxes including Paris Hilton, Will Ferrell, John Goodman, Eminem, and both Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears.
Our Take:
The loss of the two entertainment legends in one day is hard enough to cope with, along with the loss of Ed McMahon that same week. The false celebrity reports of other deaths are shameful and irresponsible. The celebrity death hoax needs to end because there is no chance it will ever top the news of our recent losses that people have mourned already.
Jeff Goldblum, Harrison Ford, Matt Damon, Paris Hilton, Miley Cyrus: You are all still alive…right? Just checking!
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Marvel vs Capcom 2 gets pushed back
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