Debunked: Internet Death Hoax Story Generator on MediaMass

Mick West

Administrator
Staff member
After the breaking story of Philip Seymour Hoffman's death today by the Wall Street Journal on Twitter, many people linked to what looked like a story that suggested he was the victim of an internet death hoax earlier this week:

http://en.mediamass.net/people/philip-seymour-hoffman/deathhoax.html (http://archive.is/tpbNI)

This gave lots of people the false hope that the WSJ story was itself a hoax, that the WSJ had somehow been fooled by someone just propagating this old hoax story.

However, the MediaMass site is simple an automated generator of these stories. You can adjust the URL to get an internet death hoax story about any famous person. In this case, it was the hoax itself that was the hoax.

MediaMass have been doing this since 2012, and even explain how it works in the red-linked "UPDATE" in the middle of each story.
http://en.mediamass.net/blog/mediamass-project

Our ‘People’ section
Our website is very new (launched back at the end of October 2012) and still under construction. The ‘People’ section the only active one.

The concept is to select the most typical, representative and recurrent articles across Gossip magazines and to make them available for all the celebrities in our database.

The ‘People’ section is a humorous parody of Gossip magazines, all stories are obviously not true.

Thus thousands of celebrities, Bill Gates in USA, Zhang Ziyi in China, Ranbir Kapoor in India, etc. all have a dog called “Spinee” recovering from successful surgery.
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But the problem with this is the the readership of an article starts to drop very rapidly after the headline. Very few people would click the update link. Few still would read and understand the explanation.

Here's the Hoffman "story" and three random celebrities.



http://en.mediamass.net/people/kanye-west/deathhoax.html (http://archive.is/KHd7w)
http://en.mediamass.net/people/justin-bieber/deathhoax.html (http://archive.is/j1eHt)
http://en.mediamass.net/people/bill-gates/deathhoax.html (http://archive.is/jhiK8)
 
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Isn't this image a hoax? As far as I know, he was carbonized ...

Yes, and the article points that out.

A purported post-mortem photograph of Paul Walker was circulated on the Internet a few days after his death:

[image]

That image isn't actually a morgue photo of the actor, however; it's a picture of a Christian missionary named Alan Dennis who was severely injured in a construction accident in the Congo in 2011. (Alan Dennis did not die: he survived the accident and experienced a substantial recovery.)
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Yes, and the article points that out.

A purported post-mortem photograph of Paul Walker was circulated on the Internet a few days after his death:

[image]

That image isn't actually a morgue photo of the actor, however; it's a picture of a Christian missionary named Alan Dennis who was severely injured in a construction accident in the Congo in 2011. (Alan Dennis did not die: he survived the accident and experienced a substantial recovery.)
Content from External Source
Oh, sorry, didn't read the entire article ...
 
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