Philip Seymour Hoffman: Death Hoaxes of Hoaxes of Hoaxes

The claim that the recent death of Philip Seymour Hoffman was ‘predicted’ ‘earlier this week’ by a tabloid media site appears to be a hoax. Actually, it’s a hoax of a hoax.

There is a website called Mediamass, that appears to run some kind of software script that is linked to google search. The way it seems to work is that if someone searches google for the name of a famous person and the words “dead 2014″ or just “dead” or “died” the Mediamass site will produce a web page with that person’s face on a fake tabloid mag called ‘Starmag’ and some text explaining, not that the famous person in question has died, but that the famous person was reported to have died and that the report was in fact a hoax. The story and picture are themselves a hoax.

Basically, the site either creates or has already archived pages that report that most famous people have been victims of a death hoax. Not only have these people not died, but they have not been the victims of death hoaxes either.

The text of story is pretty much the same for every person, except that the script has been programmed to differentiate between actors, directors, singers, politicians etc.

Look at this page for example, where I simply changed the name in the url from George Clooney:

http://en.mediamass.net/people/george-clooney/deathhoax.html

to Carly Simon

http://en.mediamass.net/people/carly-simon/deathhoax.html

Have a go putting some famous person’s name in there and see just how extensive their database is.

The people behind the Mediamass site claim its purpose is:

to expose with humour, exaggeration and ridicule the contemporary mass production and mass consumption that we observe

Also it will not only mock the procuders [sic] (mainstream media, journalists) as it is common when questioning and criticizing mass media, but also the consumers as one cannot exist without the other. Sensationalism, lack of verification of information, ethics and standards issues are only symptoms of the actual social and economic order. This is particularly obvious when observing the role of social networking sites in spreading rumours.

which is fair enough I suppose, but it seems a little pointless to continue to produce the ‘death hoax’ hoaxes when they can be so readily exposed as…well…hoaxes of hoaxes of hoaxes.

To be honest though, I was initially very interested in the idea that it may be possible to precipitate the real death of a person by producing a death hoax announcement. I trust that the following images courtesy of the Mediamass site will suffice to explain why:

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