35 Viral News Stories From 2014 That Were Actually Totally Untrue
The internet sits on a throne of lies.
2. You cannot charge your iPhone 6 by putting it in the microwave because that will actually destroy your iPhone and your microwave.
3. A Syrian boy did not risk his life to save a girl from a hail of gunfire.
Lars Klevberg
4. Pumpkin spice-flavoured condoms were not a thing.
5. Steven Spielberg did not actually kill a dinosaur.
6. That “Drunk Girl in Public” video was a hoax.
7. Emma Watson's nude photos were never going to leak online.
Andres Stapff / Reuters
8. That time a teenager working in Target became a huge meme was not a marketing stunt; the claim that it was a marketing stunt was, in fact, a marketing stunt.
9. A young dog attack victim probably wasn't asked to leave a KFC because of the scars on her face.
10. Nobody was giving away $10,000,000 for retweets.
11. There wasn't a UFO over Portsmouth, England.
Daniel Cook
12. There wasn't a wolf in an Olympic luger's hallway.
13. This wasn't a photo from the polar vortex that hit the US in January.
Lighthouse on Lake Michigan in Chicago today. Man.
John Heilemann@jheilFollow
Lighthouse on Lake Michigan in Chicago today. Man.
11:29 AM - 07 Jan 14ReplyRetweetFavorite
14. This wasn't the most adorable mugshot ever.
16. France did not ban working after 6pm.
17. There was not a deadly great white shark heading straight for the UK.
ocearch.org / BuzzFeed
18. The UK was also not threatened by a ghost ship infested with cannibal rats.
19. Doritos could not give you Ebola.
20. Red-headed people did not face extinction.
Frederick M. Brown / Getty Images
21. A computer did not pass the Turing test.
22. This was not former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych's toilet.
23. This was not a picture taken from a plane flying over a rainbow.
Caters News
24. A sex tape that went viral was not of an Argentinian teacher having sex with a student.
25. A Chick-Fil-A manager did not ban the word "bae".
26. Jose Canseco's finger did not fall off.
27. The Turin shroud was not created by a radioactive earthquake.
Vittorio Zunino Celotto / Getty Images
29. The NRA did not take out an ad on Grindr.
30. #EndFathersDay: not a feminist hashtag.
31. Malia Obama: not pregnant.
Gary Cameron / Reuters
32. The Big Mac: not being discontinued.
33. Macaulay Culkin: not dead.
34. Wayne Knight: also not dead.
35. And nobody actually said “fuck her right in the pussy” on live TV, because it was a hoax, except then people started saying it anyway, so now it is real again.
This post has been updated from 27 things to 35 things, to reflect the fact that we remembered a load of other stuff that wasn't true in 2014.
The list is still not exhaustive.