Well Christmas Day is done for another year, and before we don our party suits for New Years, it’s time for us to take a look back at a busy 2019 and check out the biggest Internet hoaxes of the year.
So put down those mince pies and join us for a brief look back at the highlights of the last 12 months. Here are the five biggest online hoaxes of 2019 according to our website, search, social media and email statistics.
The viral claim that Andrea Wilson is some sort of Facebook hacker that can hack your accounts simply by adding her as a friend was a prolific hoax in 2019.
Of the five hoaxes we look at on this article, this is the only that didn’t start in 2019. We actually wrote about Andrea Wilson, the phantom Facebook hacker, at the start of 2018. But in that year, Andrea was lost in a jumble of other identical fake hacker warnings with only the name of the alleged hacker the difference.
But this year the Andrea Wilson has proved to be by far the most popular fake hacker warning, topping our most visited articles for two months in a row in September and October. See our article about it here.
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A 2019 was a key year in the fight against climate change and pollution, and saw a number of high profile protests across the globe. The most notable of these were the protests by the Extinction Rebellion group.
This spawned a particular hoax both in April and September 2019, after two of their protests. A photo circulated social media that claimed to show Hyde Park full of litter immediately after Extinction Rebellion had protested there. However it wasn’t accurate, since the litter was attributed to the annual pro-cannabis 4/20 gathering, and not the Extinction Rebellion protestors, as conceded by various pro-hemp organisations.
However this hasn’t stopped the same photo spreading in 2019 multiple times, frequently after protests in London, but also attributed to other locations that saw pro-environment protests, including Queensland in Australia.
We discussed this hoax here.
In January, we wrote about a spurious piece of medical “advice” that warned against getting up from bed too quickly as this can result in a stroke. The advice claimed readers should wait at least a minute and a half before leaving their bed.
And despite being dismissed by medical entities, this piece of misinformation has been popular all year round. That is possibly because it was claimed it was authored by a paramedic, and also came attached to some accurate information about blood pressure and compatibility.
We discuss the hoax here.
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It is perhaps not surprising that with the rise in popularity of digital manipulation software like Photoshop that fake photos have been on the rise for a while, and one of our top five hoaxes of 2019 is such a photo.
The above photo that shows a blue whale and its calf swimming under a bridge, only it isn’t real. The whale has been made to look much larger than it actually is, and has been digitally added to the image. We discuss the fake photo here along with the original images.
In February 2019, the Internet was hit by a wild viral panic surrounding Momo, a creepy creature that was allegedly “haunting” or “hacking” the Internet. Viral messages claimed Momo was appearing in children’s videos with inappropriate messages, and this in turn led to a whole plethora of related rumours that were nothing more than stories designed to alarm and panic parents, with little basis in reality.
First things first, the image of Momo was actually a sculpture that for a time was displayed in an art gallery in Japan. The rumours that she was appearing in children’s videos with inappropriate messages were overly alarmist. Because the rumour went incredibly viral, being passed between parents on social media, it was perhaps inevitable that pranksters did indeed wind up creating Momo themed videos, some of which did contain inappropriate messages, but these were isolated incidents and the videos were not prolifically watched.
But the nonsense only got more…. nonsensical, and soon there were even more technically infeasible rumours that began to spread online, including the vague and illogical claim that Momo was “hacking” video games like Fortnite, or that she could make her image appear on a phone if she called you, and that accepting the call would result in your phone being hacked. All nonsense, of course.
The whole Momo ordeal disappeared as quickly as it arrived, and could be best described as a viral prank that spawned a lot of misinformation, and much of what we encountered online was the result of the panicked viral messages, as opposed to the viral messages being the result of what was actually happening.
We discuss the Momo incident in this post.