The Undertaker--born Mark Calaway--hasn’t died, but a fake death article is saying otherwise, angering fans of the WWE wrestler just days after fellow legend The Ultimate Warrior passed away.
A fake report on Empire Sports, a self-described “satire” website, claims he died in his Texas home. The article had tens of thousands of “likes” and shares on Facebook. Another fake news website, Huzlers.com, republished the article.
A disclaimer for the website reads: “Empire Sports is a satirical and entertainment website. Empire Sports uses invented names in all its stories, except in cases when public figures are being satirized. Any other use of real names is accidental and coincidental.”
On Thursday, people were still tweeting and sharing the hoax story. But some people noticed it was fake and expressed their anger.
“You people need to stop saying that this person died or that person died death is not a [expletive] joke this stupid [expletive] should be shut down it is wrong to think death is funny I hope you people loose all your reader,” one person wrote in the site’s comments section.
“Dude, what the [expletive] is this? are you kidding me Warrior just died and now you want to write that the Undertaker died too as to ride the wave of the warriors unfortunate death?? you guys are attention whores and should be ashamed of yourselves. i know this is a satire but it’s a little too [expletive] early to be laughing about a wrestlers death,” another wrote. The user was referring to the recent passing of the Ultimate Warrior, another WWE wrestler.
According to a report by CBS last month, fake news websites like Empire Sports can make a decent amount of money if their celebrity death hoax stories go viral.
Tim Stevens, the editor at large at CNET, told CBS: “A site like TMZ makes maybe 100 million page views a month. Obviously, these fake sites aren’t getting anywhere near that, but if they can get really a fraction of that, they can make tens of thousands of dollars off of one of these fake stories over just a couple of days.”
“If you’re someone who just casually reads headlines or reads the first couple sentences of a story, you probably would never notice that these stories are fake,” Stevens added.
