Sort of inspired by the closed Tawnee Stone thread. Recently my wife fell “victim” to a celeb death hoax involving Richard Thomas. Now, we seem to have heard that Vladimir Putin is not longer living. Who starts these and why.
I see video thumbnails on Youtube all the time – never clicked on one – showing fakes of extremely famous people in open caskets, etc., with clickbaity headlines like “YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT KILLED JOHN TRAVOLTA.” Presumably these are removed as fast as Youtube’s algorithms are able to, but some are weeks or months old, or at least appear to be.
Who? Bots? The Russians? Who knows.
Why? click$, of course.
How (do they get away with it for more than 5 minutes)? Beats the hell out of me.
Why is simple. People will click on them, because celebrities are an important part of modern culture.
There’s now a phrase for it: parasocial interaction. Even the Wiki page is bizarrely long, longer than most biography pages, as if talking about parasocial interaction is more important than talking about the people that are being parasocially interacted with.
I’ve seen those too. That they are bots is my guess.