Millions fooled by fake “live” ISS spacewalk stream

A Facebook live video apparently showing a spacewalk outside the International Space Station (ISS) turned out to be something of a hoax, it has been revealed.

Most online hoaxers aim to dupe a few thousand people. However a recent hoax purporting to show a live spacewalk may have earned itself the most prolific ruse of 2016, fooling literally millions of social media users in a space of only a few hours.

Using Facebook’s Live Video feature, hoaxers purported to be live-streaming a video of a spacewalk outside the ISS, and the stream was soon shared on the Facebook pages of many popular pages including UNILAD and Viral USA.

Because of the popularity of such pages, the video was soon being viewed by hundreds of thousands of people and accumulating millions of engagements.

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But the spacewalk wasn’t live. According to most reports, it was actually just a replay of a spacewalk take from 2013.

The hoax appeared to just be an innocent prank as opposed to having any kind of sinister “end-game”, but we imagine many viewers wasted a good amount of time watching a spacewalk from years ago.

For future reference, scheduled spacewalks are announced via the NASA and ISS Facebook pages and websites, and can be watched live through the UStream account belonging to NASA.