Millions tricked by Facebook live video of lightbulb repair on 1999ft tower

Sneaky hoaxers have once again duped millions of social media users with a Facebook live video that wasn’t actually live.

The Facebook pages named USA Viral and Interestinate purported to be both broadcasting a real-time live video of a bulb being changed on a 1999ft tower. The “live” videos soon garnered hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of views from interested social media users.

However the video wasn’t live. It appeared it was simply taken from YouTube and uploaded to Facebook’s real-time video feature. Examples of the same video can be seen on YouTube dating back to 2015.

Using fake live videos seems to be an effective way of luring people to Facebook pages since – by default – Facebook notify all followers of a page if that page starts transmitting a live video. This guarantees an audience for the page and makes it easier for these fake live videos to go viral (and naturally allow the Facebook page to attract new followers.)

Only a few weeks ago, a fake Facebook live video featuring a spacewalk went viral, duping many other popular Facebook pages that shared it.