A trending hashtag on Twitter – #RIPMileyCyrus – has led many to mistakenly believe the US pop singer has passed away.
Real time social media sites like Twitter are often the catalyst for celebrity death hoaxes, and in this case it is no different. Despite the hashtag #RIPMileyCyrus actually reaching the coveted ‘Trending’ section of many Twitter users homepages, the singer has not passed away. It’s just a hoax.
Why the hashtag become so prolific on Twitter largely remains a mystery. While the first usage of the hashtag is unknown, many people using it originate from South Korea, leading many to conclude that this is somehow the result of much confusion between Cyrus and a music genre popular in Korea known as K-Pop.
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Many K-Pop fans have been led to believe that Cyrus made disparaging comments about the music genre – though we have not found any evidence of this at the time of writing. However later updates reveal that it was not Cyrus, but many of her fans that made the disparaging remarks.
As the popularity of the hashtag began to increase, confusingly – yet undeniably – it has been intertwined with this bizarre K-Pop related controversy. Many Twitter users included the same hashtag in their tweets asking for clarification on the issue, only further increasing the usage of the hashtag until it eventually began to trend.
Whatever the specifics, Miley Cyrus is still alive.