On Saturday night, another vicious celebrity rumor hit the Net claiming Jonah Hex star Megan Fox aborted a black baby. Earlier in the week, various sites and message boards flared up with a rumor that Justin Bieber has syphilis and/or had broken his neck in a terrible car accident. None of this crap is true, of course.
So how the hell do these crazy bits of gossip get started? Well, one of the parties to blame is the website 4Chan.org. These weirdos spend far too much of their time thinking up insane celebrity rumors and then working to spread them all over the Net.
One 4Chan’s goals is to get the rumor featured as the number one search term on Google, which then plants it in the number one spot on Google Trends. When that happens, pretty much every gossipy site on the Net will pick it up. Kind of like we’re doing right now.
Why? Because they are pretty much rabid attention whores. They like feeling ‘special’ by succeeding in manipulating powerhouses like Google. Every now and then, one of their rumors actually even gets reported as fact by the mainstream press. This makes them feel like their ‘tools’ are actually way, way larger than they really are.
The lesson to be learned here is that any rumor you hear could very well be fake. So when you see a rumor floating out on the Nets saying Russell Crowe is dead, for example, think twice before you start spreading it around. Because somewhere out there, probably at 4Chan.org, people are laughing wildly over their latest prank on unsuspecting Internet surfers.
Update: Although an anoymous poster on 4Chan.org claims they are responsible for the Megan Fox rumor (a claim a number of gossip-fueled sites support), several commenters here claims EbaumsWorld.com is actually to blame. We love it when these people are so desperate to inflate their own sense of self-importance they have to battle it out in snarky comments to make sure they get the credit!
>> Previously:Â Justin Bieber Breaks Neck? Is It True?