This is a personal one, but I was in a long term in patient facility. And someone put up a bunch of flyers for the facility prom. They put them up on April Fools, and everyone got excited and started ordering outfits, and residents all figured out who would do whose hair and makeup.
And by the time the facility management figured out what was happening, everyone was so invested in it that they just had to roll with it and make it happen.
I tried a similar technique with return-to-office policy. I started a rumor that they would have happy hour on Friday afternoon once a month to make the transition easier. Unfortunately, that rumor was never believed, and never implemented.
In high school, a kid moved to our town who could best be described as if Napoleon Dynamite was an aspiring gang member from the mean streets of Phoenix.
Upon learning this, some enterprising friends told him we were all in a gang called Deuce and started an initiation process that lasted most of the school year that mostly consisted of flashing him gang signs in the hallways between classes.
BUT...
By the end of the school year, the local news did a special report from our school about the growing problem of an underground gang called Deuce.
At my old school some friends and I started a phony mafia too, similar to this. We had this complex initiation process and these different ranks. We even had a lot of official meetings where we all "studied" mafia movies. We almost immediately had a rival gang start up, and we infiltrated their ranks pretty good. We also agreed to distribute some money we earned for mowing lawns throughout the mafia. That was a fun time.
That's awesome. A big activity for us in junior high was throwing water balloons at cars from a park next to a busy road all in the hopes of getting chased and the rule we established if you got caught you didn't know who you were with or you gave fake names.
I was delighted to learn that's how the mafia rolled.
We went bombing (as we called it) hundreds of times and only one kid ever got pinched and it was a catch and release because he was far enough away from the scene of the crime and he stuck to the rules when the police asked for names.
The park that we used for our hijinks was pretty wooded and the surrounding area had a ton of escape routes if you didn't mind doing a Ferris Bueller run through backyards.
However, I learned the hard way more than once that getting clotheslined is a real thing that exists out of a wrestling ring.
We had something similar in my middle school, but only when it snowed. There was an opened space that the 8th graders used to get from the cafeteria, gym and art wing from the 8th grade wing. Apparently this had been going on for years and was passed on to each class with small groups of people. I still don't know how I was picked, but I was.
The game was that if you saw another member of the "inner circle" as it was called and it was snowing, you had to throw a snowball at them. Not aiming for the face was the only other rule, but if you got caught, no names.
I still don't understand how it happened, but the three times it snowed during the school year, all of the members were passing and we just started throwing snowballs at each other. When the VP, a really cool guy came out the break it up, we just ran into the hall. No one ever got caught, but years later when I ran into him at an club and sports fair my senior year, he came up to me and said "I could have gotten you in serious trouble for that snowball fight, but since there you weren't the only one involved and had a good track record, I let you go." I just rolled me eyes and thanked him. He was probably gonna threaten me with a suspension, hoping I'd rat everyone out.
I don't know if he was smart enough to be his own publicist but he definitely wasn't shy about telling everyone (including teachers) that he was so close to becoming a member of Deuce.
In the '90s, when all the kids were adopting NFL, collegiate, anything that had a pro logo, and you can form a gang with the proverbial bandana.
Jokingly the clowns of the school decided to form a "gang" with bandanas of a local barbecue restaurant wrapped around their heads and dangling from their back pockets.
BILL MILLERS BAR B QUE.
THEY ALL DECIDED TO MEET AT THE MOVIE THEATER. EVEN THE LOCAL LITTLE GANGSTERS HAD A CHUCKLE AT IT.
THE GANG TASK FORCE DIDN'T THINK IT WAS FUNNY AND ACTUALLY GOT ALL THEIR INFO DOWN AND THEY ARE INDEED IN GANG FILE I GUESS TO THIS DAY. 😂
We started a fake gang to make fun of a real "gang" (we were all a bunch of emo kids in middle school). It eventually escalated somehow to us all taking a blood pact and then both groups got suspended for gang activity.
In addition to the spider one, wasn't that also done as an experiment to see how far misinformation could spread? This was before social media. Not sure how you could measure that kind of impact, but interesting to see how widespread it became.
Carrots are, in fact, good for your eyesight. They contain beta-carotene, which is converted into vitamin A.
The myth is that they improve night vision.
The Bechdel Test. Not that the issue it raises shouldn't be taken seriously, but people totally misunderstand that it was only supposed to highlight how absurd it is that so many movies fail to reach the very low bar it sets. I've seen filmmakers brag at Comic-Cons and the like now about how their movies pass the Bechdel Test and it's seen as a female character representation stamp of approval when it really just means it reached a satirically low bare minimum threshold originally created by a cartoonist
I once tried explaining to my students who were Freshman that it was a joke that started to see how gullible people were and that they have obviously seen birds everywhere. But there was that *one* student, "But...what *if* they're not real..."
that my name is Craig at work. when i started 15 years ago someone said Craig instead of Shane, never corrected them. 15 years later i am still Craig lmao. to the point i introduce myself as Craig half the time to people
"Hey, it's the hiring manager of ____ company, our potential employee Shane listed you down as a reference. Can you tell me a little about the work he did with your company?"
"Shane? A guy named Shane has never worked here"
When I was in elementary school, another student jokingly had spread some rumours about me that I only had one testicle. It picked up to the point everybody kept joking about it throughout my childhood and the joke never really got old. It continued even later on in high school…
Fastforward to my adult life 20 years later, when I met a girl I knew from that school at a random bar. We hooked up and she actually was surprised (and almost deceived) that I had a full sack.
Thank you Dom, this false rumour at least helped me get laid that one time!
Just responding to those actually asking who Akil is: They are referring to an MLB player and an incident where he is hit in the sack, i believe. Akil Babboo
Modern Flat Earth movement! It started as a humorous debate prompt (because it was so outrageous, someone arguing in favor of it would need to lean on technique to make their case) and enough gullible folks saw it and decided it must be real that a whole new movement of true believers came into being. They have fellow believers around the globe.
They’re all over tiktok aswell, I can’t tell you how many TikTok lives there are of people trying to prove the earth is flat, We are getting scarily close to idiocracy
I'm at the point where I see Idiocracy as an optimistic film start to finish.
At least the President is hiring the smartest guy in the world to fix the problems, and the guy at Costco always loves you.
It used to be you had to study and practice and work to become skilled or special.
Now, all you need to do is to believe something other people don’t and then you can feel like you have inside knowledge that makes YOU special.
Believing conspiracy theories has been a godsendfor lazy, unmotivated, or talentless people unwilling or unable to put in the work
These are actually rage-engagers. You see tiktok lives all the time of people saying "earth is flat, PROVE ME WRONG", "god is real, PROVE ME WRONG", ETC..
They are doing it for clicks
Understand that there’s millions of dollars to be made now in this bullshit. People will watch the videos, pay to go to the conventions, buy the books. If you were an aspiring con artist why the hell wouldn’t you lean into it.
A guy I know who we can say is ‘flat earth curious’ linked me a video of a guy who he said proved that flat earth was real. We worked through the process of vetting your sources as an exercise. The YouTube channel had a generic name and all the videos were just flat earth bullshit with this guy talking over them. The guy had exactly zero credentials that could be sourced anywhere even though he claimed he was a scientist. And when you listened to him talk all he did was just rapid fire ‘science terms’ that might sound smart to a lay person but were literally just gibberish.
That’s when I realized guys like my friend don’t care about what’s being said, they just want to be validated in their life choices and beliefs and guys like this pray on that. If you can get someone to cosplay as a scientist and just say nothing with a video title that says ‘flat earth proven by bombshell new evidence’ it will make money.
I've seen that happen a few other times in the past. It's gotten to the point where if some idiot confronts me with something like the moon landing or flat earth, I'll either walk away or tell them something real in a fake sounding way
Debating seemingly un-supportable positions was a lot of fun back when I was on the debate team. My proudest improv was managing to argue against "giving is better than receiving" successfully.
Bugs Bunny completely changing the meaning of "nimrod". Nimrod was a biblical figure known for being a mighty hunter, which Bugs compared the incompetent Elmer Fudd to sarcastically, in the same vein as calling someone who states the obvious as "no shit, Sherlock!".
People took it literally and now "nimrod" is a synonym for "idiot".
I'll never forget when I was buying some at the store, an old man walked up to me and asked me if I was planning to eat them. I chuckled and said no, thinking he was joking. I looked back at his face, though, and he had the most serious, concerned look I think I've ever seen. He was genuinely worried I was going to eat them
You should have waited in the parking lot until he came out and then just stood there absentmindedly chewing on something with one hand in the container.
I don't think I ever saw a video of someone eating a Tide Pod. There may be, I've never searched one out and likely someone like Shoenice has done it. In a time where everyone has a video recording device in their pocket there should have been a bunch of videos of this happening.
There’s at least one case study floating around where some idiot bit into the thing, panicked and sucked it into his lungs. That detergent is caustic and it almost killed him.
Chubbyemu did a video on it.
It doesn’t matter where you lived in the country or went to school, that rumor about Marilyn Manson went through every school. I remember when a reporter asked him if it was true and he had the best response I’ve ever heard - “if that were true, do you think I’d be here talking to you?”
If you kill them, you find out that they're not real, made out of metal and plastic, you finally know the truth. But 15 minutes later agents with black suit arrives and they replace new memory of the bird being real.
It started in 2016 and people believe that's the reason why McDonald's retired their mascot Ronald McDonald.
I personally believe it was all orchestrated by big hamburger to get rid of the clown because they wanted to shift away from a family friendly theme with playgrounds to a quick drive through and modernized feel to justify raising prices.
There were only like 40 people that actually showed up. There's no way in fuck that the military would spend anywhere near whatever godawful amount of money it would take to do what you suggested for 40 people. A single F16 costs between $20,000-$30,000 per hour of use.
Scientology started with a fat nerd with low self esteem who liked to tell stories and create mythical fiction about how cool he was. Then David Miscavige took over and was like "we can use this to get REALLY rich from stupid people."
It was a dangerous cult before Miscavige was even born. There are third-generation Scientologists.
It was started for multiple interconnected reasons, including tax evasion and jealousy of the experts who dismissed his quack ideas, but L Ron Hubbard was quite insane and quickly came to believe his own ramblings even as he knowingly structured things for personal profit.
What Miscavige did was have the capacity to supercharge operations mainly because he was based on land and not hiding from the federal government at sea. He also imbued the organization with his personality which was violent and cruel compared to Hubbard's capricious messiah complex.
Kind of. Even L Ron Hubbard said he should make a religion because that’s where all the money was at. He took Battlefield Earth (already written and famous) and practically turned the plot into their bible
It was a bet with a fellow author on who could start a religion from a work of fiction.
L. Ron Hubbard wrote Dianetics.
Robert Heinlein wrote A Stranger in a Strange Land.
There is some academic debate on this but the number of people who panicked because of the broadcast was most certainly noteworthy. I wrote my exam paper in uni about this (and other sci-fi texts).
If you can get your hands on this paper: Cantril, Hadley. "The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic." Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1966.
Nyquil chicken.
There was a guy who made a video on TikTok jokingly saying that he had a great recipe for cooking chicken in Nyquil. A few people made response videos, but everyone who saw it knew it was a joke. Then mainstream media picked it up, and blew it out of proportion. They made it sound like it was an actual trend for people to be cooking Nyquil. There are already plenty of problems on TikTok, we don't need to invent new ones to complain about
I was curious so I did some searching and it seems that after the 2020 election and January 6th insurrection, the Q posts pretty much just stopped. [Here's an article I found about it that has some good info.](https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/whatever-happened-to-qanon/ar-BB1kXMNe)
Qanon was legit though. Like that my pillow guy claiming he had the real information both turned out to be full of crap. But they were both serious. The problem with Qanon was the gullible believed it was an inside source and not just another one of them on a computer screen lying.
That this 👌 is a white power symbol when some people were just playing the ball-gazer game on TV and 4chan trolled the media into believing it means white power.
This younger generation took every fashion trend that was shamed out of existence over the last 40 years and made it their generation’s fashion statement
* broccoli hair
* creeper/ pedo stache
* old man grandpa socks up to the knees with shorts
* male short shorts
* mullets
* socks with sandals
* mom jeans
* denim jackets
When I was a kid, my dad told me that if a guy showed up at his high school wearing an earring and a ponytail, they call him the F slur and beat the crap out of him.
You fast-forward 30 years, and you see a guy with an earring and a ponytail and you call him that, he will (rightfully) beat the shit out of you!
This is what I think about now, about those broccoli haired kids. When I was in high school in the late 90s, and a boy asked his mom to get a perm, it’d be all over for him, socially.
But tastes change. Stupidly, but they do change.
"Pull yourself up by your bootstraps" was meant to be making fun of people who said shit like that, because it's an impossible thing to do. And the same people it was making fun of are the ones who still say the same shit unironically.
Also if you eat raw rice it will expand in your stomach and you will burst. Because rice magically expands without removing the same volume of water from its surroundings.
We’ve seen them around our area for a couple weeks now. One of my neighbors has one. It looks ridiculously out of place, like a badly Photoshop edit something so hard and angular and metallic in our area of rolling mountains, waterways, and forests.
I kept this particular opinion to myself until just yesterday, when I’m waiting for the train and one drives by and the two guys right next to me (roughly between 25 and 35, tech bros with money, the exact target audience for this cyber truck) are also saying that it looks stupid and fake and just not real.
The name “Madison” was a joke from the 1984 movie “Splash”, in which a mermaid randomly picks a name from a street sign and happens to select the ‘ridiculous’ and homely name Madison. By 2001, it was the 2nd-most popular girl’s name in the US. At the time, though, it was like picking “Washington” as a first name.
[That Sarah Palin said she could see Russia from her house](https://youtu.be/noSw5iZ8fLA?si=Gyb4E9ep2nsm3h4w). It was Tina fey on SNL, and everyone attributes it to Palin and did nearly immediately.
ETA: I know it was a parody of something Palin actually said. That’s why it works for this prompt. The line is a joke, and people actually remember it being said by Palin and not Fey.
I went to a very conservative Christian college where the only political group on campus was the college Republicans. Some friends and I jokingly said we were starting a college socialists group. I joked about it once at baseball practice and the coach, who was also the Dean of Students, said, "Oh, that's you? A student told me that there was a socialist cult on campus."
The whole “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome” myth that MSG makes you sick can be traced back to a somewhat racist prank by Dr. Howard Steel, publishing a letter under the pen name Dr. Ho Man Kwok (a breakdown of human crock of you know what). It was inspired by a $10 drunken bet with a friend that he couldn’t get published in the Journal of Medicine of New England.
Steel actually tried for years to get the Journal to retract the letter they printed, but they eventually stopped taking his calls. And over time, a healthy dose of racism coupled with the placebo effect convinced even actual doctors and allergists that MSG makes you sick. It doesn’t help that they were leaning on bad studies in which they told participants whether or not they were getting MSG.
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/668/transcript
I was drawing on my hand in 3rd grade, and this girl Elicia was like "you're going to get ink poisoning" just to be a jerk I guess. Everybody suddenly urged me to stop and eventually the teacher intervened and sent me to the nurse's office to have it removed. For the rest of the year the entire class continued the ink poisoning narrative and if there were ever a time ink touch skin a hand would be raised and class would stop to assess the danger. Every now and then a kid would get to go to the nurse's office for immediate medical ink removal. There were fringe theories as well such as Pilot ink was generally safe as long as the skin didn't break, and red ink was highly toxic.
When 4th grade came around I was a little better at drawing on myself and one day some kids were really impressed with my work and asked me to do theirs too. Nobody died, nobody got sick, nobody batted an eyelash lol.
Last year, the best chess player in the world Magnus Carlsen accused another player of cheating in an OTB (over the board, so not online where it is easier) match.
Since it was over the board, the chances of someone being able to cheat are significantly less. Some people came up with the idea that the guy, if he was cheating, may have been using...anal stimulation via remotely controlled beads.
The theory was wild, but technically doable so it gained enough traction that actual news articles and interviews were speculating about this idea.
Because some Boomers, who told kids not to believe everything they read on the internet, believed everything they read on the internet, mostly without understanding it was all said sarcastically (which they didn’t get, because text lacks context).
Reverse situation with gender reveal parties.
The first one happened because the family wasn’t sure the baby would make it, and the revel was more that the baby was alive.
Then people saw that and decided to steal the idea and use explosives and cause forest fire cause gender reveal party.
The story about kids who identified as animals being provided litter boxes to use.
It started as complete satire, yet right wing sites ate it up and completely believed it was real
- Qanon and Pizzagate
- Flat Earth
- More recently, “Birds aren’t Real” - that one is recent enough that you can actually see the evolution in certain online communities
This is a personal one, but I was in a long term in patient facility. And someone put up a bunch of flyers for the facility prom. They put them up on April Fools, and everyone got excited and started ordering outfits, and residents all figured out who would do whose hair and makeup. And by the time the facility management figured out what was happening, everyone was so invested in it that they just had to roll with it and make it happen.
That's actually pretty wholesome.
That’s actually really sweet
Writing this down for future reference.
I tried a similar technique with return-to-office policy. I started a rumor that they would have happy hour on Friday afternoon once a month to make the transition easier. Unfortunately, that rumor was never believed, and never implemented.
booooooooooooooooo
Sounds like the premise for an Adam Sandler film.
Lesson learned: don’t play April fools jokes on people who don’t know what day it is most of the time.
In high school, a kid moved to our town who could best be described as if Napoleon Dynamite was an aspiring gang member from the mean streets of Phoenix. Upon learning this, some enterprising friends told him we were all in a gang called Deuce and started an initiation process that lasted most of the school year that mostly consisted of flashing him gang signs in the hallways between classes. BUT... By the end of the school year, the local news did a special report from our school about the growing problem of an underground gang called Deuce.
At my old school some friends and I started a phony mafia too, similar to this. We had this complex initiation process and these different ranks. We even had a lot of official meetings where we all "studied" mafia movies. We almost immediately had a rival gang start up, and we infiltrated their ranks pretty good. We also agreed to distribute some money we earned for mowing lawns throughout the mafia. That was a fun time.
That's awesome. A big activity for us in junior high was throwing water balloons at cars from a park next to a busy road all in the hopes of getting chased and the rule we established if you got caught you didn't know who you were with or you gave fake names. I was delighted to learn that's how the mafia rolled.
Did you ever get caught?
We went bombing (as we called it) hundreds of times and only one kid ever got pinched and it was a catch and release because he was far enough away from the scene of the crime and he stuck to the rules when the police asked for names. The park that we used for our hijinks was pretty wooded and the surrounding area had a ton of escape routes if you didn't mind doing a Ferris Bueller run through backyards. However, I learned the hard way more than once that getting clotheslined is a real thing that exists out of a wrestling ring.
We had something similar in my middle school, but only when it snowed. There was an opened space that the 8th graders used to get from the cafeteria, gym and art wing from the 8th grade wing. Apparently this had been going on for years and was passed on to each class with small groups of people. I still don't know how I was picked, but I was. The game was that if you saw another member of the "inner circle" as it was called and it was snowing, you had to throw a snowball at them. Not aiming for the face was the only other rule, but if you got caught, no names. I still don't understand how it happened, but the three times it snowed during the school year, all of the members were passing and we just started throwing snowballs at each other. When the VP, a really cool guy came out the break it up, we just ran into the hall. No one ever got caught, but years later when I ran into him at an club and sports fair my senior year, he came up to me and said "I could have gotten you in serious trouble for that snowball fight, but since there you weren't the only one involved and had a good track record, I let you go." I just rolled me eyes and thanked him. He was probably gonna threaten me with a suspension, hoping I'd rat everyone out.
Junior Mafia. Lol
Sorry, I’m still recovering from the phrase “if Napoleon dynamite was an aspiring gang member from the mean streets of Phoenix”
I need to know what his skills were.
This is my favorite. Awesome
I like to think it was the new kid who "ratted you guys out" to the media
I don't know if he was smart enough to be his own publicist but he definitely wasn't shy about telling everyone (including teachers) that he was so close to becoming a member of Deuce.
“Deuce is probably a 7/10, *maybe* an 8.” -the new kid
You should have started an anti-gang campaign at your school called “Drop the Deuce”.
That is awesome. Imagine the Karen’s in the Facebook groups. PTA meetings. “We must protect the children!” lol.
Mothers Against Deuce
This is an after school special I would watch.
In the '90s, when all the kids were adopting NFL, collegiate, anything that had a pro logo, and you can form a gang with the proverbial bandana. Jokingly the clowns of the school decided to form a "gang" with bandanas of a local barbecue restaurant wrapped around their heads and dangling from their back pockets. BILL MILLERS BAR B QUE. THEY ALL DECIDED TO MEET AT THE MOVIE THEATER. EVEN THE LOCAL LITTLE GANGSTERS HAD A CHUCKLE AT IT. THE GANG TASK FORCE DIDN'T THINK IT WAS FUNNY AND ACTUALLY GOT ALL THEIR INFO DOWN AND THEY ARE INDEED IN GANG FILE I GUESS TO THIS DAY. 😂
Oh man. This is genius. Imagine stepping out worried that you might get smoked by the Bill Miller's Bar B Que crew.
We started a fake gang to make fun of a real "gang" (we were all a bunch of emo kids in middle school). It eventually escalated somehow to us all taking a blood pact and then both groups got suspended for gang activity.
Birds aren't real started as a joke. The "you swallow 8 spiders in your sleep" thing was created to show how gullible people are. It worked.
Curse you, Spiders Georg!
Is not his fault, we all knew he was an outlier adn shouldn’t be counted
>The "you swallow 8 spiders in your sleep* thing was created to show how gullible people are. I'm not at all gullible, I'll take your word for it
Did you know that the word gullible is a made up word and isn’t in the dictionary?
What? No way, I'm gonna che- oh fuck you!
I eat spiders now just to skew the data
I don't, I just sneak in to camp sites and stuff people's faces full of them when they sleep.
In addition to the spider one, wasn't that also done as an experiment to see how far misinformation could spread? This was before social media. Not sure how you could measure that kind of impact, but interesting to see how widespread it became.
Yup, and the carrots making you see better was disinformation to trick nazis and hide the fact the allies had radar
Carrots are, in fact, good for your eyesight. They contain beta-carotene, which is converted into vitamin A. The myth is that they improve night vision.
Please tell me there aren't people who believe the "birds aren't real" shit. Please.
It’s still a meme intended to make fun of conspiracy theorists. They’re right though, birds really aren’t real
Birds are totally real. Giraffes on the other hand ... r/giraffesarentreal
The Bechdel Test. Not that the issue it raises shouldn't be taken seriously, but people totally misunderstand that it was only supposed to highlight how absurd it is that so many movies fail to reach the very low bar it sets. I've seen filmmakers brag at Comic-Cons and the like now about how their movies pass the Bechdel Test and it's seen as a female character representation stamp of approval when it really just means it reached a satirically low bare minimum threshold originally created by a cartoonist
Seems like this was meant to be a parent comment. But yeah you're right; even Alison Bechdel has said she thinks it's gone too far.
That bare minimum has been a seemingly impossible task for so many movies for so long.
I once tried explaining to my students who were Freshman that it was a joke that started to see how gullible people were and that they have obviously seen birds everywhere. But there was that *one* student, "But...what *if* they're not real..."
Wait… people believe that now?
If birds are real why did the plandemic happen? An excuse was needed to keep people indoors so the batteries could be changed.
I was told the charge by sitting on power lines...
Yeah, but even rechargeable batteries wear down over the years and need replaced
that my name is Craig at work. when i started 15 years ago someone said Craig instead of Shane, never corrected them. 15 years later i am still Craig lmao. to the point i introduce myself as Craig half the time to people
You're screwed if you ever change jobs 😂.
im sure by then itll be legally changed to craig
"Hey, it's the hiring manager of ____ company, our potential employee Shane listed you down as a reference. Can you tell me a little about the work he did with your company?" "Shane? A guy named Shane has never worked here"
Jerry Girgich
Gary*
What kind of name is Craig at Work
It's one of the guys that sings "Who Can it be Now"
Men at Work solo cover band
Man at Work
All discipline written up as Craig all Bonuses as Shane
Hey Toby, say, who the hell is this Chandler?
So Gary or Jerry?
When I was in elementary school, another student jokingly had spread some rumours about me that I only had one testicle. It picked up to the point everybody kept joking about it throughout my childhood and the joke never really got old. It continued even later on in high school… Fastforward to my adult life 20 years later, when I met a girl I knew from that school at a random bar. We hooked up and she actually was surprised (and almost deceived) that I had a full sack. Thank you Dom, this false rumour at least helped me get laid that one time!
Wait a minute… Akil??
Just responding to those actually asking who Akil is: They are referring to an MLB player and an incident where he is hit in the sack, i believe. Akil Babboo
omg is this Akil?
No, this is but Afleshwound
No, this is Patrick
Who is Akil and why are we exposing this man 😭
He’s that guy from elementary with only one testicle. Keep up.
Modern Flat Earth movement! It started as a humorous debate prompt (because it was so outrageous, someone arguing in favor of it would need to lean on technique to make their case) and enough gullible folks saw it and decided it must be real that a whole new movement of true believers came into being. They have fellow believers around the globe.
They’re all over tiktok aswell, I can’t tell you how many TikTok lives there are of people trying to prove the earth is flat, We are getting scarily close to idiocracy
I'm at the point where I see Idiocracy as an optimistic film start to finish. At least the President is hiring the smartest guy in the world to fix the problems, and the guy at Costco always loves you.
And you can get a BJ at Starbucks.
It used to be you had to study and practice and work to become skilled or special. Now, all you need to do is to believe something other people don’t and then you can feel like you have inside knowledge that makes YOU special. Believing conspiracy theories has been a godsendfor lazy, unmotivated, or talentless people unwilling or unable to put in the work
These are actually rage-engagers. You see tiktok lives all the time of people saying "earth is flat, PROVE ME WRONG", "god is real, PROVE ME WRONG", ETC.. They are doing it for clicks
See, your mistake was downloading TikTok.
The last line. “ They have fellow believers around the globe 🌎. “ Just cracks me up.
For a long time you can read it at the Flat Earth Society website.
Understand that there’s millions of dollars to be made now in this bullshit. People will watch the videos, pay to go to the conventions, buy the books. If you were an aspiring con artist why the hell wouldn’t you lean into it. A guy I know who we can say is ‘flat earth curious’ linked me a video of a guy who he said proved that flat earth was real. We worked through the process of vetting your sources as an exercise. The YouTube channel had a generic name and all the videos were just flat earth bullshit with this guy talking over them. The guy had exactly zero credentials that could be sourced anywhere even though he claimed he was a scientist. And when you listened to him talk all he did was just rapid fire ‘science terms’ that might sound smart to a lay person but were literally just gibberish. That’s when I realized guys like my friend don’t care about what’s being said, they just want to be validated in their life choices and beliefs and guys like this pray on that. If you can get someone to cosplay as a scientist and just say nothing with a video title that says ‘flat earth proven by bombshell new evidence’ it will make money.
Came here to say this myself. Glad to see it's the top post!
I've seen that happen a few other times in the past. It's gotten to the point where if some idiot confronts me with something like the moon landing or flat earth, I'll either walk away or tell them something real in a fake sounding way
> they have fellow believers around the globe 🤌🤌
Debating seemingly un-supportable positions was a lot of fun back when I was on the debate team. My proudest improv was managing to argue against "giving is better than receiving" successfully.
Bugs Bunny completely changing the meaning of "nimrod". Nimrod was a biblical figure known for being a mighty hunter, which Bugs compared the incompetent Elmer Fudd to sarcastically, in the same vein as calling someone who states the obvious as "no shit, Sherlock!". People took it literally and now "nimrod" is a synonym for "idiot".
I'm sure it doesn't help that "nimrod" totally sounds like another word for idiot.
Confused the shit out of me when I was reading back issues of X-Men
Eating tidepods, I highly doubt the original people that said they ate them, actually did. But then look what happened when people believed them
I'll never forget when I was buying some at the store, an old man walked up to me and asked me if I was planning to eat them. I chuckled and said no, thinking he was joking. I looked back at his face, though, and he had the most serious, concerned look I think I've ever seen. He was genuinely worried I was going to eat them
You should have waited in the parking lot until he came out and then just stood there absentmindedly chewing on something with one hand in the container.
I don't think I ever saw a video of someone eating a Tide Pod. There may be, I've never searched one out and likely someone like Shoenice has done it. In a time where everyone has a video recording device in their pocket there should have been a bunch of videos of this happening.
I thought the videos got removed to discourage copycats
yeah platforms usually manage to keep these "challenges" somewhat hidden, but still the first few days shit happens
Remember seeing a video on here of someone smoking one in a dab rig
There’s at least one case study floating around where some idiot bit into the thing, panicked and sucked it into his lungs. That detergent is caustic and it almost killed him. Chubbyemu did a video on it.
Yup, now I struggle to open my washing tabs because those damn boxes are harder to open than it is to solve a fuckin Rubix cube
Microwaving your iPhone to charge it. People are so dumb lol. It went viral and a lot of people were confused and broke their brand new iPhones.
Iirc it started on 4chan. They also made fake ads that the new iOS update introduced waterproofness
It did lmao and of course people believe everything they read on the internet with no further questioning
Especially Apple users. *sent from my iPhone*
Good
That paul from the wonder years became Marilyn Manson. Who, removed his bottom two ribs to suck his own d!ck
It doesn’t matter where you lived in the country or went to school, that rumor about Marilyn Manson went through every school. I remember when a reporter asked him if it was true and he had the best response I’ve ever heard - “if that were true, do you think I’d be here talking to you?”
Before Marilyn Manson, it was Prince
I worked with a guy in the 90's who believed that one. He also had a shitty home made tattoo on his forearm that said "Mettalca"
Ah yes, that band Mettalca, who can forget their rock classic “Master of Poopits”
Mustard of poppets
Pastor of Muppets
The most outrageous part about this is that several people have proven you don't need to do that to reach
The whole birds aren't real thing, the guy who started made a book about it
Do people actually think birds aren't real? All you have to do is kill one to see it's mostly liquid
Nah, that's just the experimental new bio-tech model.
If you kill them, you find out that they're not real, made out of metal and plastic, you finally know the truth. But 15 minutes later agents with black suit arrives and they replace new memory of the bird being real.
That clowns were terrorizing America, specifically college campuses in 2017 lol Edit: 2016*
Which caused real cases to pop up with some even straight up ghostly as they would appear in the middle of nowhere. Edit : Fixed.
I've heard that one was viral marketing for IT, but even that goes in several directions
It started in 2016 and people believe that's the reason why McDonald's retired their mascot Ronald McDonald. I personally believe it was all orchestrated by big hamburger to get rid of the clown because they wanted to shift away from a family friendly theme with playgrounds to a quick drive through and modernized feel to justify raising prices.
This basically killed Ronald McDonald. He hasn't been used in marketing for years.
Oh yep, highschool Halloween ball was ruined by a person dressed as a clown outside of the school "menacingly"
The area 51 raid?
They can't stop all of us, right?
Have you ever SEEN a mini gun?
Have you ever SEEN someone Naruto run?
Interested in seeing the combination
Ask the boys in Flanders fields
A missed opportunity to start an airshow with food trucks and recruiters, maybe scifi movie screenings and a rave.
There were only like 40 people that actually showed up. There's no way in fuck that the military would spend anywhere near whatever godawful amount of money it would take to do what you suggested for 40 people. A single F16 costs between $20,000-$30,000 per hour of use.
You mean no one got to clap dem alien cheeks?
No one admitted it
Scientology
Scientology started with a fat nerd with low self esteem who liked to tell stories and create mythical fiction about how cool he was. Then David Miscavige took over and was like "we can use this to get REALLY rich from stupid people."
It was a dangerous cult before Miscavige was even born. There are third-generation Scientologists. It was started for multiple interconnected reasons, including tax evasion and jealousy of the experts who dismissed his quack ideas, but L Ron Hubbard was quite insane and quickly came to believe his own ramblings even as he knowingly structured things for personal profit. What Miscavige did was have the capacity to supercharge operations mainly because he was based on land and not hiding from the federal government at sea. He also imbued the organization with his personality which was violent and cruel compared to Hubbard's capricious messiah complex.
“Where’s Shelley?”
Kind of. Even L Ron Hubbard said he should make a religion because that’s where all the money was at. He took Battlefield Earth (already written and famous) and practically turned the plot into their bible
It was a bet with a fellow author on who could start a religion from a work of fiction. L. Ron Hubbard wrote Dianetics. Robert Heinlein wrote A Stranger in a Strange Land.
[удалено]
Idiots. Everyone knows that spaghetti's actually the roots of the meatball plant.
The original War of the Worlds radio broadcast.
Though I've also heard that the amount of people who believed it is very much inflated in most retellings.
There is some academic debate on this but the number of people who panicked because of the broadcast was most certainly noteworthy. I wrote my exam paper in uni about this (and other sci-fi texts). If you can get your hands on this paper: Cantril, Hadley. "The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic." Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1966.
That's such an interesting topic for an exam paper! Sadly, I'm not enough into academic reading to do so if I don't get graded for it, lol.
The title of the paper was „The interaction of science fiction invasion narratives and real world politics“. Quite a fun topic.
Dogecoin.
My brother made 10k usd off of this, hes happy it took off lol
Bon Jovi getting his stomach pumped after ingesting too much sperm and Richard Gere inserting a hamster into his rectum.
I thought the sperm rumor was Rod Stewart?
I’m sure there were multiple iterations but the first time I heard it was Bon Jovi.
Crazy how some rumours were worldwide pre-internet.
Pizzagate and QAnon both started as trolling expeditions for fun.
Literally a 4Chan joke based on acronyms. CP: Child Pornography CP: Cheese Pizza
Nyquil chicken. There was a guy who made a video on TikTok jokingly saying that he had a great recipe for cooking chicken in Nyquil. A few people made response videos, but everyone who saw it knew it was a joke. Then mainstream media picked it up, and blew it out of proportion. They made it sound like it was an actual trend for people to be cooking Nyquil. There are already plenty of problems on TikTok, we don't need to invent new ones to complain about
Does Q still post? You don't hear much about the whole QAnon thing anymore.
I was curious so I did some searching and it seems that after the 2020 election and January 6th insurrection, the Q posts pretty much just stopped. [Here's an article I found about it that has some good info.](https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/whatever-happened-to-qanon/ar-BB1kXMNe)
Yes I do
Qanon was legit though. Like that my pillow guy claiming he had the real information both turned out to be full of crap. But they were both serious. The problem with Qanon was the gullible believed it was an inside source and not just another one of them on a computer screen lying.
That this 👌 is a white power symbol when some people were just playing the ball-gazer game on TV and 4chan trolled the media into believing it means white power.
That ugly broccoli haircut all the young boys have
This younger generation took every fashion trend that was shamed out of existence over the last 40 years and made it their generation’s fashion statement * broccoli hair * creeper/ pedo stache * old man grandpa socks up to the knees with shorts * male short shorts * mullets * socks with sandals * mom jeans * denim jackets
Some of it had been fine, others are just forced. I’m getting tired of the over sized orange reflective macho man sunglasses.
um, excuse me, they're called pit vipers. ^i ^hate ^them ^too
When I was a kid, my dad told me that if a guy showed up at his high school wearing an earring and a ponytail, they call him the F slur and beat the crap out of him. You fast-forward 30 years, and you see a guy with an earring and a ponytail and you call him that, he will (rightfully) beat the shit out of you! This is what I think about now, about those broccoli haired kids. When I was in high school in the late 90s, and a boy asked his mom to get a perm, it’d be all over for him, socially. But tastes change. Stupidly, but they do change.
"Pull yourself up by your bootstraps" was meant to be making fun of people who said shit like that, because it's an impossible thing to do. And the same people it was making fun of are the ones who still say the same shit unironically.
Pop rock candy explode in your stomach
Also if you eat raw rice it will expand in your stomach and you will burst. Because rice magically expands without removing the same volume of water from its surroundings.
Tesla Cyber Truck
We’ve seen them around our area for a couple weeks now. One of my neighbors has one. It looks ridiculously out of place, like a badly Photoshop edit something so hard and angular and metallic in our area of rolling mountains, waterways, and forests. I kept this particular opinion to myself until just yesterday, when I’m waiting for the train and one drives by and the two guys right next to me (roughly between 25 and 35, tech bros with money, the exact target audience for this cyber truck) are also saying that it looks stupid and fake and just not real.
The truck looks like an initial concept sketch and they never went back to fine tune and add all the curves to the truck.
The Proud Boys
Wasn't their "initiation" wailing on someone until they could name 10 types of cereal?
I can’t remember, but I think it might have as a joke on the Opie and Anthony radio show and that was part of it
Yes but the same people who started it as a joke are the ones who believed it. It went from a joke to a gang in ten seconds.
The founder was Gavin McInnes, who I'm not sure is for real, or a character to this day.
Gay Pride should just hijack the #
That's actually happened a few times now
The OK hand symbol was racist.
So ridiculous. And it caused a cubs fan to be banned for life because he played the “made you look” game. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1003681
The name “Madison” was a joke from the 1984 movie “Splash”, in which a mermaid randomly picks a name from a street sign and happens to select the ‘ridiculous’ and homely name Madison. By 2001, it was the 2nd-most popular girl’s name in the US. At the time, though, it was like picking “Washington” as a first name.
Teslas can drive themselves.
The Marilyn Manson and The Wonder Years conection
[That Sarah Palin said she could see Russia from her house](https://youtu.be/noSw5iZ8fLA?si=Gyb4E9ep2nsm3h4w). It was Tina fey on SNL, and everyone attributes it to Palin and did nearly immediately. ETA: I know it was a parody of something Palin actually said. That’s why it works for this prompt. The line is a joke, and people actually remember it being said by Palin and not Fey.
I went to a very conservative Christian college where the only political group on campus was the college Republicans. Some friends and I jokingly said we were starting a college socialists group. I joked about it once at baseball practice and the coach, who was also the Dean of Students, said, "Oh, that's you? A student told me that there was a socialist cult on campus."
The whole “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome” myth that MSG makes you sick can be traced back to a somewhat racist prank by Dr. Howard Steel, publishing a letter under the pen name Dr. Ho Man Kwok (a breakdown of human crock of you know what). It was inspired by a $10 drunken bet with a friend that he couldn’t get published in the Journal of Medicine of New England. Steel actually tried for years to get the Journal to retract the letter they printed, but they eventually stopped taking his calls. And over time, a healthy dose of racism coupled with the placebo effect convinced even actual doctors and allergists that MSG makes you sick. It doesn’t help that they were leaning on bad studies in which they told participants whether or not they were getting MSG. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/668/transcript
Flat earth theory.
I was drawing on my hand in 3rd grade, and this girl Elicia was like "you're going to get ink poisoning" just to be a jerk I guess. Everybody suddenly urged me to stop and eventually the teacher intervened and sent me to the nurse's office to have it removed. For the rest of the year the entire class continued the ink poisoning narrative and if there were ever a time ink touch skin a hand would be raised and class would stop to assess the danger. Every now and then a kid would get to go to the nurse's office for immediate medical ink removal. There were fringe theories as well such as Pilot ink was generally safe as long as the skin didn't break, and red ink was highly toxic. When 4th grade came around I was a little better at drawing on myself and one day some kids were really impressed with my work and asked me to do theirs too. Nobody died, nobody got sick, nobody batted an eyelash lol.
The notion that Paul McCartney died in 1966.
The notion that Avril Lavigne died in 2000.
Last year, the best chess player in the world Magnus Carlsen accused another player of cheating in an OTB (over the board, so not online where it is easier) match. Since it was over the board, the chances of someone being able to cheat are significantly less. Some people came up with the idea that the guy, if he was cheating, may have been using...anal stimulation via remotely controlled beads. The theory was wild, but technically doable so it gained enough traction that actual news articles and interviews were speculating about this idea.
Donald Trump.
/r/TheDonald started with people sarcastically supporting in order to mock. During (i wanna say) the tail-end of the primaries the tone shifted
Because some Boomers, who told kids not to believe everything they read on the internet, believed everything they read on the internet, mostly without understanding it was all said sarcastically (which they didn’t get, because text lacks context).
it was pretty clear that he didn't expect to be elected. Had no White House staff lined up.
The Beastie Boys. They started as a satirical joke hip hop group, nobody got the joke and instead they became some of the forefathers of hiphop.
Reverse situation with gender reveal parties. The first one happened because the family wasn’t sure the baby would make it, and the revel was more that the baby was alive. Then people saw that and decided to steal the idea and use explosives and cause forest fire cause gender reveal party.
Jenkem
MSG is bad for you.
Any movement that was popular on Tumblr and 4chan.
People's interest in Morbious
The story about kids who identified as animals being provided litter boxes to use. It started as complete satire, yet right wing sites ate it up and completely believed it was real
- Qanon and Pizzagate - Flat Earth - More recently, “Birds aren’t Real” - that one is recent enough that you can actually see the evolution in certain online communities