When Michael Jackson died in June, the words “RIP Michael Jackson” on Twitter and Facebook broke the news to millions of people.
In that case, the news was true.
“RIP Kanye West,” a Twitter screamer this week, was false. The singer hadn’t been killed in a “bizarre car accident,” as had been “reported.”
Kanye West
Just as people learned through Twitter that West had died, so did they learn that he was alive and well.
West’s girlfriend, Amber Rose, tweeted the good news: “”This ‘RIP Kanye West’ topic is not funny and it’s NOT TRUE!”
According to New York’s Daily News, the false report may have started with a fake news story on 4chan.org, a bulletin board where people post comments and images.
From there, the “news” hopped to Twitter and Facebook and spun around the world.
Writing Friday in Obit, the online magazine that “looks at life through the lens of death,” Michael Schaffer suggests that there was a pre-Internet time when a Kanye West hoax would be less likely to happen.
Obituary writers at newspapers (themselves a vanishing breed, given the decline of print journalism) would first check the facts and then report the news of a celebrity death.
“Now they’re preceded by blog posts, tweets, and the jungle drums of social-networking,” Schaffer writes.
This leaves the scooped obituary writer “to focus on longer, more elegant write-ups of lost lives,” Schaffer writes. But it also allows the proliferation of false stories like that about West.
Schaffer does take heart in the fact Rose and the “nonprofessional online media” corrected the story about West before the mainstream media even had to deal with it.
Nonetheless, the hoax added another entry to the list of celebrities who have died in cyberspace while alive and well in real life.
Matt Damon, Miley Cyrus and Lil Wayne all didn’t die as reported this year.
Last year, Tom Cruise didn’t fall off a cliff in New Zealand and die, just as Tom Hanks didn’t plunge to the same fate in the same place in 2006.
And actor Jeff Goldblum didn’t make the fatal drop off that New Zealand cliff on June 25 of this year, the same day Michael Jackson did die.
To correct this misinformation, Goldblum appeared on The Colbert Report, but host Stephen Colbert refused to believe he was alive.
“Jeff, I read it on Twitter,” Colbert said of the death. Convinced, Goldblum then gave his own eulogy.
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