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  • 2016-04-03 (xsd:date)
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  • A Celebrity Had This to Say About Your Town! (en)
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  • At the end of March 2016, our readers began asking us whether it was true that some very famous people had experienced flat tires in small towns across America and later praised the residents of those areas for their kindness and eagerness to render assistance. Those queries were very similar to ones we had received a month earlier about a similar spate of false rumors about many A-list celebrities' choosing to move to small towns in the U.S. and Canada, having tired of Hollywood's phoniness and fallen in love with the little slices of Heaven found in smaller and quieter communities. The articles all feature a revolving list of celebrities (e.g., Matthew McConaughey, Patrick Dempsey, Bill Murray, Tom Hanks, Adam Sandler, Harrison Ford, Will Ferrell) purportedly talking about a variety of towns across the U.S. (e.g., Mustang, Oklahoma; Marion, Illinois; Rochester, New Hampshire; Pflugerville, Texas; Marion, Ohio). Like the celebrity moving to a small town hoaxes, all these snippets of entertainment news came from what appeared to be just two websites: WLEB 21 and WCPM 3 News (both used local news source as tag lines, without specifying precisely just where the sites were local to). Again, either a very untrustworthy tire dealer was operating somewhere in Los Angeles, or these two brand new sites were novel social media prank generators aimed at attracting traffic through reams of localized shares. The two web sites are virtually identical in appearance: And the similarities between the sites aren't solely stylistic — the celebrity experiences they report are also implausibly identical: Harrison Ford and Tom Hanks were among celebrities so purportedly unfortunate that they experienced flat tires in multiple small towns (but fortunate in that all those areas were home to very helpful residents): WCPM 3 News and WLEB 21 also bear disclaimers identical to each other and to those of the two sites that were behind the celebrity moving to a small town rumors (Headline Brief and McKenzie Post): McKenzie Post, Headline Brief, WCPM 3 News, and WLEB 21 were very similar to the prank generator FeedNewz, the primary purpose of which is user submission of fake news stories for sharing among social media friends. Social media users eagerly to share these seemingly relevant items, in turn driving traffic to the sites and boosting their bottom lines. While sharing the phony news reports causes no direct harm to readers, the trend contributes to a social media climate encouraging hoax purveyors through financial incentives. Variations: In August 2017, the hoax received a minor makeover. Instead of geotargeting social media users, fake news purveyors leveraged religious networks to rack up share counts. Iterations with titles such as What Adam Sandler is saying about Mormons or What Matthew McConaughey is saying about Mormons began circulating on social media: (en)
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