The Internet’s perfect death

Death hoaxes are a given on the web these days, of course. They’re so widespread and so predictable, in fact, that even the juiciest ones typically fail to register on anything like a mass scale. Of the untold dozens of death hoaxes sites like Huzlers and Empire News have pumped out in the past six months, only a handful have really stuck.

When they’re flying by you on the daily, each hoax seems like a one-off, an aggravating gotcha that boomerangs back into the Internet void before you have the chance to scrutinize it closely. But when you actually zoom out a bit, enough to fit all the biggest hoaxes in one frame, some pretty clear patterns emerge. Like, the Internet prefers to fake-kill men over women. And the favored cause of death is car accidents, versus overdoses, murders, suicides or the unlikely runner-up: falls from cliffs.