Internet hoaxes

false or misleading information presented as news

hoax where water is presented by an uncommon name

"Pizzagate" is a conspiracy theory that went viral during the 2016 United States presidential election cycle, falsely claiming that the New York City Police Department (NYPD) had discovered a pedophile ring linked to members of the Democratic Party while searching through Anthony Weiner's emails. It has been extensively discredited by a wide range of organizations, including the Washington, D.C. police.

Polish Wikipedia article on a fake person for whom a street was apparently named

controversy over a Wikipedia user and Wikia employee's purported identity

website

Listenbourg is a fictional country created as the subject of an internet meme in October 2022, which depicts it as an extension of the Iberian Peninsula. French Twitter user Gaspard Hoelscher shared a doctored map of Europe with a red arrow pointing to the outline of a pasted country adjacent to Portugal and Spain, and joked that Americans would not be able to name the country.

fabricated articles on the Chinese Wikipedia, 2012–2022

Hoax in a Wikipedia article about journalist John Seigenthaler

theory

website that deliberately publishes hoaxes and disinformation

internet hoax

Wikipedia hoax in 2012

Internet meme about fictitious film

Progesterex is a fictitious date rape drug that would purportedly cause sterilization. It is part of a hoax that began to circulate in 1999 via e-mail on the internet. No actual drug by this name or even with these properties exists, and no such incident has ever been documented or confirmed. The most high profile person falling for the hoax was British MP Lynne Featherstone, who asked a question about the fake drug in Parliament.

hoax image related to the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center

Wikipedia hoax

American comedian (born 1985)

urban legend

Wikimedia list article

Portuguese Wikipedia hoax article

German blogger and confabulator (1987-2019)

lonelygirl15 is an American science fiction thriller web series created by Miles Beckett, Mesh Flinders, Greg Goodfried, and Amanda Goodfried. It was independently released on YouTube from June 16, 2006, to August 1, 2008, and was also briefly released on Revver and Myspace. The series revolves around the initially mundane life of homeschooled 16-year-old Bree Avery (Jessica Lee Rose), who uses the username Lonelygirl15 online. She goes on the run with her friend Daniel (Yousef Abu-Taleb) after her parents' mysterious religion is revealed to be The Order, a blood-harvesting operation that want

Goojje (, ) was a spoof website of Google China, which encouraged the real site to stay online and comply with Internet censorship in the People's Republic of China. The site was created after Google executives publicly threatened to shut down the Chinese site following the Operation Aurora cyber attack on Google China, which some computer security experts believe may have come from within China as in the GhostNet cyber spying operation. Google China executives had also publicly condemned the necessity of filtering search results in line with the Golden Shield Project (also known as the Great

Internet hoax and fictional animal

fictional persona of a blog by Tom MacMaster

beauty fad defined as "when bikini bottoms are suspended between the two hip bones, causing a space between the bikini and the lower abdomen"

fictitious cancer-suffering teenager portrayed on the Internet by an American woman

fictional character, hoax, and meme

fictional NASA document

Internet meme in China

Antimsemitic canard falsely attributed to Benjamin Franklin

BuyTigers.com is a satirical website that claims to sell tigers online and ship them worldwide. After complaints by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the author revealed the site to be a hoax.

thumb|alt=A 3D diagram of the proposed iLoo showing a blue, cuboid-shaped toilet cubical with a lavatory situated to the right. A computer keyboard and plasma screen are positioned opposite the toilet bowl, and a sink is in the centre. On top of the cubical is a wireless aerial with demonstrative waves emanating from it. Microsoft's MSN branding is in the left-hand corner of the diagram. |The iLoo as depicted by MSN UK and distributed by news providers The iLoo (short for Internet loo) was a cancelled Microsoft project to develop a Wi-Fi Internet-enabled portable toilet. The iLoo, which was to

thumb|kremvax.DEMOS|demos[[.su, a follow-up server in 2007]] Kremvax was originally a fictitious Usenet site at the Kremlin, named like the then large number of Usenet VAXen with names of the form foovax. Kremvax was announced on April 1, 1984, in a posting ostensibly originated there by Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko. The posting was actually forged by Piet Beertema of CWI (in Amsterdam) as an April Fool's prank—"because the notion that Usenet might ever penetrate the Iron Curtain seemed so totally absurd at the time".

Toothing was originally a hoax claim that Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones or PDAs were being used to arrange random sexual encounters, perpetrated as a prank on the media who reported it. The hoax was created by Ste Curran, then Editor at Large at the gaming magazine Edge, and ex-journalist Simon Byron. They based it on the two concepts, namely dogging and bluejacking, that were popular at the time. The creators started a forum in March 2004 where they wrote fake news articles about toothing with other members and then sent them off to well-known Internet-based news services. The point of the