When social media exploded last week with false claims about the death of young viral rapper Lil Tay, it was in some sense a familiar tale. After all, celebrity death hoaxes are as old as the internet itself. Long before online misinformation became a major concern in the world of politics, the internet was notorious for spreading dubious rumors about celebrities dying. Snopes, the hoax-debunking website that has catalogued these incidents for decades, cites research showing that “the celebrity death hoax proliferates across the internet mainly because it feeds on a number of more basic instincts among users, such as ‘performing’ their grief on social media.”
By the time the false reports were taken down or corrected, the damage to Lil Tay, her family, and her friends had already been done.
The infrastructure of the internet also enables this rumor mill. For example, a website called Fake a Wish allows users to auto-generate such fake stories and attribute them to a phony but official-sounding source called Global Associated News. Yet the false narrative around Lil Tay’s demise also wound up as a headline in no less a credible source than the Los Angeles Times, one of America’s premier “papers of record.” By the time the false reports were taken down or corrected, the damage to Lil Tay, her family and her friends had already been done.
This pipeline — from a single bogus (and reportedly hacked) Instagram post to the broader social media community to culture aggregators like Pop Crave, and then to a prestigious news outlet like the Los Angeles Times — reveals something important about the accelerating problems of today’s pop culture news landscape. But more than that, it suggests something very worrying about our increasingly decentralized online news landscape generally.
Contemporary entertainment and celebrity journalism includes plenty of high-quality professional work, as well as reams of low-quality click bait. Yet the overall field has been plagued in recent years by a set of industry trends that the unfortunate Lil Tay saga lays bare. When massive social media publishers first picked up the Lil Tay story, they were not simply tracking the fake Instagram post in a vacuum. Rather, they were responding to the immense reaction that the post had already generated on social media, where it quickly became a hot topic of discussion and “user engagement.”
Today’s culture tastemakers, observers, professional gossipers and writers are tasked with constantly monitoring social media for the latest popular trend, with the goal of capitalizing on it for clicks and the advertising dollars that follow. In the cutthroat battle for online attention, the priority is to be part of the social media conversation — and never be left out. This incentivizes speed above all else, with sometimes disastrous results.
To be fair, the pressure to break news can be felt across the contemporary media industry. But professional journalistic practices like fact-checking are supposed to function as a check on these impulses. And here is where entertainment and celebrity journalism appears especially at risk. Celebrity and entertainment stories may not always feel as serious as the latest White House policy announcement or Supreme Court decision, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have real world consequences. They cannot exist in some post-truth vacuum.









