WARNING: The following post contains images that some users may find disturbing. Discretion is advised.
Working in the online world can be a bit of a minefield — the web is full of fakes, frauds and hoaxes. Sorting through them all can be equally frustrating and entertaining. Global News spends a lot of time verifying online material, as do sites like Storyful (some even read through reams of documents, like the Verification Handbook, explaining how). What better thing to write a weekly column about?
Here’s this week’s edition of real and fake stuff on the web (and here’s even more fake stuff from the past month).
The Rock trolls the Internet
Anyone watching the video Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson posted on Instagram this week could be excused for being squeamish.
The video showed his finger bent in a way no finger should bend – a pretty graphic broken bone.
Thankfully, it wasn’t his real hand.
While filming the movie Central Intelligence, The Rock has been using a prosthetic hand for certain scenes, New Line Cinema told Global News.
Twitter trolls fake out the stock market
A report this week that Twitter had a found a buyer led the stock price of the social media company to spike.
- A ‘zombie’ virus is raging among raccoons. What to know
- N.S. couple felt they won ‘doctor lottery’ after years on wait-list. Now they’re back on it
- Panera to remove ‘Charged Sips’ drink from Canada amid wrongful death lawsuits
- ‘Summer of discontent’ coming over public service in-office order: unions
But the report was fake. It appeared on Bloomberg.market.com, a site made to look like Bloomberg News.
Just before noon, the story appeared under the headline “Twitter attracts suitors” and the stock of the company soared by 5 per cent.
This past month has seen a surge in the number of fake news sites using deceiving prefixes to appear like the real thing.
One example is nbc.com.co, a site featuring fake stories designed to look like NBC.
Friday’s top fake story is about a Christian pastor in Vermont supposedly sentenced to a year in prison for refusing to marry a gay couple.
Also check out USAToday.com.co and NYTimes.com.co for all your latest fake U.S. news.
‘Exploding butt implants’
A woman’s butt implants supposedly exploded while she was exercising at a gym in Boston this week.
Thirty-three-year-old Serena Beuford reportedly screamed, “My ass is gone!” while doing a squat exercise and “hearing a loud pop.”
This was another fake viral hit by site Newswatch33 (of Jay-Z and Beyonce buying the confederate flag rights fame). The story made the rounds, starting with news site News 4 San Antonio and eventually Cosmopolitan.
The photo used by Newswatch33 was of Instagram user elnaz1985.
Pancake emergency parking spot faux pas
An unbelievable picture hit the front page of Reddit this week under the title, “My local police must be responding to a pancake emergency.”
It was real, the Lafayette, Indiana, police told Global News. The officer in question apparently didn’t see the handicapped symbol on the ground in front of the IHOP location and parked there accidentally.
Ryan Schmidt, who posted the image to social media, told a different story.
“He was very rude and arrogant,” said Schmidt in an email to Global News. He declined to be interviewed.
Donald Trump will make America great again… with Nazis?
This week, Donald Trump put out a campaign poster on Twitter featuring his face (giving a stern-looking glare), a picture of the White House, soldiers marching in a row, all overlaid by an American flag.
But social media users picked up on one detail on the poster that seemed odd:
And users eventually located the stock image itself:
Trump blamed an intern.
The Nazi claim was…
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