Gotye dead? nah, just a victim of “citizen journalism”

Your Ad Here

You can’t believe everything you see on the interwebs. That goes double for anything you see on a breaking news site that allows average Joes to post stories without the intervening hand of….well, anyone.

So, despite what you may have seen on Twitter, 32-year-old singer Wouter De Backer, better known as Gotye, is alive and well. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t a victim. Gotye is a victim of the latest fake news generated/social media powered celebrity death hoax.

The story first popped up on CNN’s citizen journalism site iReport, which allows anyone and everyone to upload photos, videos, etc. without any sort of screening and fact-checking. Of course, the purpose of iReport is to give people a venue for breaking news from their own backyard – an interesting idea in theory. But, as you can see, if one “citizen journalist” goes rogue and starts a death rumor – it can spread pretty fast, partly because everyone sees the CNN logo and immediately gives the story more credibility.

Here’s what the story looked like as it spread across social networks (it’s not up anymore).

The story read that Gotye shot himself:

At 4:32 AM EST, it was reported that Gotye had shot himself in the head with a 9mm handgun. He was pronounced dead at﻿ 4:45 AM, and the investigation concluded that the cause of death was suicide. It was confirmed shortly after by family and friends. He was quickly taken to the Central Montmorency Hospital, but died from his injuries shortly after. His family has stated that they plan a closed funeral.

Gotye took to Twitter to refute the rumor:

span { display: inline-block; width: 16px; height: 16px; background-image: url(“http://images.ientrymail.com/socialditto/everything-spritev2.png”); background-repeat: no-repeat; } div.twitter-inner-ditto219431193349849088 div.timestamp a.twitreply > span { background-position: 0px 3px; } div.twitter-inner-ditto219431193349849088 div.timestamp a.twitreply:hover > span { background-position: -16px 3px; } div.twitter-inner-ditto219431193349849088 div.timestamp a.favorite > span { background-position: -32px 2px; } div.twitter-inner-ditto219431193349849088 div.timestamp a.favorite:hover > span { background-position: -48px 2px; } div.twitter-inner-ditto219431193349849088 div.timestamp a.retweet > span { background-position: -80px 3px; } div.twitter-inner-ditto219431193349849088 div.timestamp a.retweet:hover > span { background-position: -96px 3px; } p.indent { margin-left: 20px; } div.twitter-inner-ditto219431193349849088 span.name { font-weight: bold; } div.twitter-inner-ditto219431193349849088 span.at-name a,div.twitter-inner-ditto219431193349849088 span.at-name a:visited, div.twitter-inner-ditto219431193349849088 span.at-name a:hover { color: #999; text-decoration: none; font-size: 14px; font-weight: normal; } ]]> gotye
@gotye

I’m not dead. #Pinkalbumtitles

The fact that celebrities are having to actually come out on Facebook and Twitter and tell the world that they actually aren’t dead is a testament to just how fast these death hoaxes can spread on social media. And they are becoming so prevalent these days that as a celeb, you’re just not cool unless Twitter has killed you.

The “CNN” tag on this story made it particularly potent, virally speaking. As always, the advice for social media users is simply this: double check before you share.

[Via Sophos Naked Security]

Share and Enjoy:
  • Print this article!
  • Digg
  • Sphinn
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Mixx
  • Google Bookmarks

Sources: http://feedproxy.google.com/

Tags: , ,

Comments are closed.

Tag Cloud

Foursquare Seo expert Seo firm Seo exp Inc. Seo companies Yahoo Google Analytics Linkedin Social Media Marketing Google Maps META Seo pr SPAM Seo company Online Marketing Link building Seo services Youtube Search Engine Optimization keywords TITLE LINKS TRAFFIC Facebook Twitter Internet Ning SEO WEB
http://www.seogate.net/socialmedia/gotye-dead-nah-just-victim-citizen-journalism.html
www.seogate.net
crawl=CC-MAIN-2013-20
31248
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:MSUAF7GM4WXXUIP3WQ7WJY3233B33KAE
<urn:uuid:a9e5110d-fbc7-4dd3-973e-35cd973c7460>
2013-05-19T17:01:22Z
198.154.96.210
sha1:CQTYSS4G4HPLDBIYGPP3JLFJNO3XYCJU
<urn:uuid:32f885d3-e604-4143-a696-8eaced277932>
http://www.seogate.net/socialmedia/gotye-dead-nah-just-victim-citizen-journalism.html
response
<urn:uuid:deddfeae-abc7-4971-9dcc-31c2036616c2>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2013-20
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for Spring 2013
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf