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On Oct. 6, 2016, a rumor raced through social media that Joyce Meyer, a Christian writer and inspirational speaker, had suddenly died after a short illness. The rumor was fueled wholesale by an article from a previously-unknown web site of extremely dubious veracity called Updater24: Updater24's About page contains no disclaimer stating its content is untrue or intended to be satirical. However, some of its other articles (with headlines such as BREAKING: Garden of Eden Discovered in Grenada, for example) and the lack of bylines, along with entire passages entirely copied and pasted from Wikipedia pages, follow the same pattern as other pages that specialize in hoax news, which generate clicks and in turn, advertising revenue for their owners. (Some also contain malware.) If someone as high profile as Meyer were to suddenly die, the news would certainly appear on her own web page or in her hometown newspaper, not an obscure site that has no bylines or contact information, and which appears to only specialize in clickbait and plagiarized content. News of Joyce Meyer's untimely death also didn't appear to have reached Joyce Meyer herself, who, hours after the unfortunate news broke, was still tweeting: Meyer later released a video to further quash the death hoax:
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