As you use social media, please pause before clicking on a celebrity death news item. I’m seeing a resurgence of celebrity death hoaxes on Facebook and other platforms right now, and they all lead to trouble.
I don’t blame people for clicking on these. Some of them look very believable. But anyone can post anything on Facebook, and Meta is very bad at policing itself and removing bad content. It’s up to us to think twice and avoid or report hazardous posts.
Celebrity death hoaxes are nothing new. The recent batch seems bent on tricking users into installing adware and malware on their computers. Here are some shots of the deceptive screens that appear for anyone unlucky enough to click these things:
Anyone falling victims to these sorts of downloads may soon suffer from lots of pop-ups, sales offers and web redirects, or worse. If you’ve caught some computer-crud from these hoaxes, give me a call and we can clean up your system fairly quickly.
And if you see any news on social media about a celebrity death, resist the urge to click. Instead, open a new tab and go to a trusted news website, and search for the celebrity’s name there. That should be a safer way to determine the truth of the matter.
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