Proof of People’s Gullibility With a Fake Michael Video
RTL announced last Tuesday that a video showing Michael Jackson alive and coming out of a forensic car was, in fact, a test to measure how gullible internet users were.
Last week, RTL posted a video based on an “anonymous source” on YouTube. In it, a person with Michael Jackson’s appearance is escorted by someone from a forensic station wagon out of a parking lot. In a single day, 880,000 people watched the video. Although the same network removed the video from YouTube a day later, a downloaded version of it was shown on other websites.
On August 26, the network officially announced during its daily news that the video was fake. RTL’s goal in creating and releasing this video was to test how successfully incorrect information and conspiracies could influence viewers’ minds. According to a spokesperson for the network, unfortunately, many people fell for it.
Even though the video is very amateurish, has poor lighting and a muffled sound, and was filmed near the German city of Cologne—so that anyone should be able to easily recognize it as fake—viewers still got fooled by the forensic “truck” branding, with English colors and letters written on the station wagon, which implied that the filming location was the United States.
The network spokesperson said: “We wanted to show how easily users can be exploited by fake videos. So we made a video that showed Michael Jackson alive. Even though everyone now knows he has passed away, people’s reaction to this video took our breath away. Unfortunately, many believed it, even though we tried to make the video in a way that any ordinary viewer could recognize it as fake.”
Fake rumors and fake news spread quickly across the internet, and fake video websites get the highest number of views among video-hosting sites.
Twitter has also made it easier for rumors to spread. The American actor Patrick Swayze, who is battling pancreatic cancer, this year—after thousands of Twitter users spread a rumor about his death—was forced to officially announce that he was alive. Jeff Goldblum was the same.
RTL’s spokesperson also said that their use of Michael Jackson’s name for this test upset and angered his fans: “We didn’t intend to disrespect Michael Jackson. But we needed to use a big name to carry out this test. If we had used Britney Spears, her fans would have complained too.”
Source: eMJey / RTL / AP