6 B.S. Stories That Fooled Everyone on Facebook (8/5/14)

Eat that, millennials ... only you can't, because you're all too busy taking pictures of it. That's what a study carried out by the owner of a "popular restaurant" in NYC found out when he supposedly compared tapes from 2004 and 2014: Ten years ago, everyone enjoyed their meal, talked to each other, and generally looked like better, more spiritually fulfilled people (you remember 2004, right?), while now it's all Instagrams, selfies, and feasting on the rotting carcass of common sense and good values.

Just ask the anonymous Craigslist post that all of these stories are citing:

newyork.craigslist.org
And Craigslist is never wrong!

Yep, that's seriously the only "proof" that Washington Post, Consumerist, Gothamist, and NY Daily News needed to blast the "idiot smartphone generation": a completely unsourced and anonymous "study" posted on the sketchiest site of all mankind blaming poor service on the customers -- despite Slate rounding up a healthy handful of actual New York restaurant owners saying the complete opposite of this. In fact, some of them even like getting photos of their dishes plastered on social media for free. But what do they know? If it's not a faceless block of hyperbolic text blaming the new generation for every problem on a user submission webpage, then it's not worth knowing.

And turned it into this:

jezebel.com
No. Literally. No.

In fact, one of the professors involved even stressed that it would be a scientific loss if the only thing the media got out of this was some fart-related headlines ... to which the media glazed over like a Dumb & Dumber bit before jumping up and down and making farting sounds into their elbows. We get it, guys. Farts are hilarious. But slightly less so when they're, y'know, setting back human progress.

... inspired a whole bunch of news sites to dust off one of the deadliest weapons in modern journalism: the hashtag-using headline.

news.com.au

people.com

syracuse.com
#WeStillLying

The entire elaborate story -- passed on by Fox, People, the Daily Mail, and your Facebook news feed -- comes entirely from a stranger's Instagram picture, which coincidentally was ripped off by time travelers and posted to Reddit months ago, before the Langoliers got their fill. At some point, the New York Post added the fact that the story takes place in England, because, what the hell, it might as well.

This would have ended up like the dozens of "real" and "hilarious" texts that go viral, if it wasn't for the fact that it features real people, and real people tend to mind when you make up bullshit about them -- especially if everyone got it completely backward. The "wedding crashers" are actually a rap group that was shooting this music video in Detroit when the wedding party photobombed them to take some pictures in the same place. So, yes, whoever made up that text message is full of crap, and just a wincy bit racist for automatically assuming the black guys were the uninvited party guests and not the other way around.

Shockingly enough, when you trust a sleazy website filled with human misery that is packed butthole to eyebrows with legal problems (we mean TMZ, not PornHub), it sometimes backfires on you. Seriously, how dare they bring down the name of an American institution that has brought so many hours of joy to so many people? (Now we do mean PornHub.)

The real headline here is "Teen Star Photographed in Wheelchair at Disney, TMZ Intern Forced to Come Up With Story" -- although even the originally cited article at TMZ points out the fact that B.I.E.B.ertron-2000 isn't actually cutting in line, and has injured his leg playing basketball. But shucks, that kind of information would require reading past the first paragraph, so it's "fuck the Biebs" all around.

tmz.com
Granted, we're not entirely sure if this thing is in English.

There's just one thing. Notice how the headlines can't decide if he actually booked a flight? That's because this Dutch biker has gone silent about the whole thing since the story first ran, the only evidence that it happened at all coming from his blog and a single account given to a local station. But, as the good people of Slate have pointed out, nowhere in the harrowing tale does he even so much as mention that he had booked a seat on the lost MH17, just that he was considering flying on that day. As for the other near miss: He was flying in the general direction of the missing plane, so, you know, that counts as "booking a flight" too, right? Never mind the fact that boarding MH370 would have required a 1,500-mile detour.

While we're at it: You know the story about the 100 "top AIDS researchers" who died in the second plane? That actual number, according to the same enlightening Slate article, is more like six. Despite that, this story was shared so widely that even this guy repeated it:

So congratulations, bullshit news! You made it! You rule the world now!