Truth or Hoax?

It was a Saturday morning and I was just waking up when I jumped on Faceboook to catch up on all the latest goss that happened overnight while I was sleeping. And there it was. Pages and pages dedicated to the death of Adam Sandler! I was shocked and texted a few friends to see if they knew. A couple had and some others hadn’t. But then I switched on the morning news and not one thing was said about the ‘death’ of the celebrity and then I started thinking. If someone as famous as this had died, I’m pretty sure it would be on the news. So I Googled the claimed ‘death’ of Adam Sandler to get to the bottom of it. And I did. There were news stories everywhere about the Adam Sandler death hoax that had fooled the world. This hoax had such an impact that Adam Sandler himself had to come out and confirm that he was alive. Now this hoax just goes to the bottom of a long list of other celebrities that have been reported dead on the Internet which have turned out to be a hoax. Just this year alone there has been many including, Morgan Freeman, Bill Cosby, Paris Hilton, ReeceWitherspoon, 50 Cent, Channing Tatum and Eddie Murphy.

These death hoaxes cause such an impact that television news stations around the world report the story due to the increased news worthiness. 

These hoaxes are fuelled by online social media sites as they generate word of mouth. Take my situation for example, just lying in bed on a Saturday morning checking the news on a portable device, contacting friends to see if they have heard the news. Right there I increased the attention surrounding the hoax by contacting friends to see if they heard. The friends I told who hadn’t heard the news would have then passed on the information to more people that initially came from me.

An online journalism lecture titled ‘New Media, New Issues’ contained some important points on how to pick the truth from a hoax.

Some of these points included:

-          Does the story sound possible?

-          When was the web domain registered?

-          Have the photos on the site been ripped off?

-          Does the phone number given appear anywhere else on the web?

-          Does the address listed on the website actually exsist?

Now if I followed these points as soon as I discovered the news, I wouldn’t have contributed to the attention of the hoax. But we all know that this hoax will definitely not be the last.

It just goes to show the power that online journalism has on the world. The death hoaxes are primarily generated on the Internet and as the attention surrounding those builds, news organisations begin to take on reporting the story. In this case and in many other cases the Internet was the first source to report the death as a hoax, before the newspapers and before the television news channels.

I guess this just illustrates the power of online journalism.