3 times the Daily Mail spread an Internet hoax

Now we’re not really fans of the UK’s Daily Mail, known ‘affectionately’ by its critics as the Daily Fail.

Politics aside, they do have a somewhat annoying tendency to fall for silly Internet hoaxes, giving them much more traction than they would normally get. Here are 3 times (4 now, we’ve added a 4th) the UK’s most popular tabloid paper fell hook line and sinker for online nonsense.

The power of a good pair of jeans

The Khabaristan Times, in mid-2015, published a story claiming that Pakistani politician Chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman blamed rising inflation and earthquakes on women wearing jeans.

Now we know that fundamentalist religion can have certain people believing in all sorts of extreme nonsense. Take for example those who believe homosexuals were the reason for flooding up and down the UK. But we’d think that it would be prudent to check if someone’s ridiculous belief was actually true before you published an article about it. Otherwise the joke’s very much on you.

The Daily Mail went with the story. The problem is that The Khabaristan Times doesn’t print real news. It’s tagline is “telling it like it almost never is”. The Daily Mail soon removed the article but not before someone managed to grab a screenshot of a social media link, below.

Driverless cars from Google

In 2013, TechCrunch published a speculative article from ‘the future’ claiming that taxi-company Uber just purchased 2500 driverless cars from Google. Despite the article being clearly dated July 23rd 2023 and claiming that driverless cars “hit the streets” over two and a half years ago, The Daily Mail still took the article at face value and reported on it as if it were true.

Only of course it wasn’t true. Driverless cars are slowly becoming a reality, but they’re not on the streets yet.

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iPhone 4 being recalled?

Anyone in the hoax-busting business knows that Twitter is full of parody accounts of celebrities, and they’re of course not meant to be taken seriously.

In 2010, a parody account for Steve Jobs tweeted that the Apple CEO was considering recalling the then-newly released iPhone 4. The news wasn’t real of course, but The Daily Mail still ran with it, apparently unaware that they were getting their news from a parody Twitter account. They published a story asserting that Steve Jobs may recall the iPhone 4. Naturally Apple weren’t happy given that the launch of the iPhone 4 wasn’t exactly smooth to begin with.

Given that tech blogs would have been all over that kind of news, but no one was, this was certainly a prime example of jumping the gun.

The “Da Pinchi” Code

As an extra bonus for you, the “Da Pinchi” Code, where the Daily Mail appeared more interested in generating a funny name rather than the accuracy of this hoax, which purports criminals are drawing different chalk symbols on the side of walls, garden sheds or even the pavement to denote whether houses are worth robbing or not.

That hoax has been spreading for years and often fools the odd police department, despite not really making any sense. Is it really likely different burgulars are communicating with each other via chalk symbols left outside houses? It’s an absurd and illogical notion, but the Daily Mail still ran with it.