Was the Jackie Chan Death Hoax an Early April Fool's Day Prank?
It
seems like April Fool’s Day pranks have started early this year.
Earlier today Daily Planet Dispatch reported that rumors of Jackie
Chan’s death were going viral. This is not the first time, of course,
that the 56 year old legendary martial arts actor and producer’s early
demise had been reported as a hoax.
The power of social media
networks like Facebook and Twitter in helping a story go viral were
demonstarted in a rather silly string of thousands of real-time results
showing up in Google, Google Trends and Twitter trends as fans of the
comedian started posting “RIP Jackie Chan” without one corroborating
story backing up the original, a ‘pastehtml’ site, put up to look like
a Yahoo7 News page.
The ‘pastehtml’ site even tried to make the
story look real by reporting that Will Smith and President Barack Obama
had paid tribute to the celebrity’s life.
Now Jackie Chan’s representatives have had to step in to quash the
rumors – with their own message on Twitter and a note on the Hong Kong
actor’s Facebook page stating: “Jackie is fine and busy preparing for
filming his next movie”.
Fortunately, many Twitter fans were wise
to the idea that this might be some kind of early April Fool’s Day
Prank and started to limit the effects of the hoax by posting Tweets
that asked people to think about the facts of the matter. There have
been a smattering of Hoax RIP claims concerning celebrities sent viral
on the site in the recent past including the purported deaths of Justin
Bieber and Jeff Goldblum.
It looks like somebody, in very poor
taste, tried to get their April Fool’s Day pranks in early this year,
unfortunately for Jackie Chan. Knowing his character, though, he’ll
just laugh it off and enjoy the added publicity.
Via http://dailyplanetdispatch.com/april-fools-day-pranks-start-early-jackie-chan-death-hoax/857720/
