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  • 2016-03-04 (xsd:date)
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  • That Super-Famous Celebrity Isn't Moving to Your Town (en)
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  • On or around 28 February 2016, we began receiving a large volume of e-mails asking whether myriad very famous people were moving to assorted small towns across the United States (and some in Canada). in some instances, celebrities (including Tom Cruise and Justin Bieber) were purportedly moving to multiple non-metropolitan areas all at the same time. The queries appeared out of nowhere at around the same time, as if an exodus from Hollywood occurred en masse for some unstated reason. The second thing that made us raise an eyebrow was that all these tidbits of entertainment reporting came from what appeared to be solely two websites -- Headline Brief and McKenzie Post. Either two visually identical and, until that point, unknown outlets had suddenly cornered the market on celebrity real estate scoops, or a new social media prank generator was afoot, causing confusion on social media. By 4 March 2016, many of the original links forwarded by readers were not operational. The remaining working links led to articles on web sites of suspicious visual similarity and near-identical content about why X celebrity decided to pick up and move to Y town: The Jolie-Pitt family was one of the celebrity clans reportedly so enraptured by small-town life that they had to purchase homes in many areas (as reported by the same outlet): Initially, McKenzie Post kicked off with a claim Leonardo DiCaprio was moving to Woodstock, Illinois, but by 3 March 2016, the cluster of [celebrity] moving to [minor town] tales grew so prolific that Arkansas' KARK covered the specious rumors. However, that outlet neglected to take note of (the admittedly difficult to find) disclaimer notices on both Headline Brief and McKenzie Post: How the celebrity move hoax posts were generated remained unclear, but it was safe to say none of the rumors were rooted in any fact whatsoever. Both McKenzie Post and Headline Brief operated in a similar fashion to the prank generator FeedNewz, enabling users to submit fake stories (by which they profited through the tendency for people to share such items with Facebook friends). Sharing the phony news reports did no direct harm, but contributed to an atmosphere in which spreading misinformation was rewarded by advertising revenue, thus encouraging additional hoax purveyors to get in on what appeared to be a very lucrative racket. (en)
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