The coronavirus has inadvertently caused a heap of Onion-eqsue stories to pop up recently, such as Scott Morrison claiming he predicted the disease back in 2016, the eradication of France’s Smurf population, and the rise of a new genre of porn. Well today we may have had the wildest coronavirus story yet as a Twitter account started spreading a hoax that Daniel Radcliffe has tested positive for the disease.
Speaking of Daniel Radcliffe and the coronavirus, the GOAT team talk about the biggest talking points about the disease on ‘It’s Been A Big Day For…’ below:
This whole hoax all began when the (now-deleted) Twitter account @BBCNewsTonight tweeted that Daniel Radcliffe has been tested positive for coronavirus. Due to the convincing user handle, people were immediately duped that it was a genuine BBC News Twitter account (despite obviously having no blue verified tick and only a few dozen followers) and soon the hoax spread like wildfire as the fake tweet quickly garnered thousands of likes and retweets before the account was suspended.
In fact, it caught on so quickly that even reputed journalists from Politico and the New York Times were duped into retweeting it, which is actually pretty worrying given their reputation for quality fact-checking. Both have since apologised for their big faux pas.
Daniel Radcliffe’s publicist has also since publicly confirmed that the actor doesn’t have coronavirus so there’s no need to worry about him.
To figure out why this hoax even became a thing, Buzzfeed News spoke to the pranksters about the whole charade. Apparently the whole point of this prank was to train “society to become more tech savvy”, to “make a mockery” of Twitter’s “Hide Tweet” option in order to show how the platform can be manipulated to “cause mass paranoia”, and last but not least, because it was funny.
As for why Daniel Radcliffe was picked to be the face of this ridiculous coronavirus Twitter hoax, well the pranksters wanted “someone who was famous but not famous enough to be unbelievable” and the Harry Potter star fit the bill as people love him and he happens to have no social media presence.
So there you have it, Daniel Radcliffe doesn’t have coronavirus and it was all nothing but a wild Twitter hoax. Given the bonkers stories that have unfolded since the coronavirus outbreak, I shudder to think what else is on the horizon in the near future.
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