Jackie Chan Dead Again, This Time Killed by Facebook

Actor Jackie Chan appears to have gotten himself killed again, although the exact circumstances were not disclosed. This time, Chan’s second death since the beginning of the year, the cause of death seems to be Facebook and a webpage entitled “R.I.P. Jackie Chan.”

Since the Facebook page went up on Tuesday, it has gained over 100,000 followers (as of Wednesday afternoon, August 17), even though news agencies, Twitter, blogs, and other various media outlets like Zap2It.com have been reporting on the hoax almost from its inception.

It should be emphasized that Chan, the world-renowned actor who has appeared in over 100 movies including “Rush Hour” and “Shanghai Noon,” is not dead.

The 57-year-old martial arts actor was the focus of a death hoax in March as well. According to the Washington Post, Australian newspaper, the Courier Mail , tracked the fraudulent story back to a faux website called Yahoo!7News. In that particular death scenario, Chan died of a heart attack.

That rumor ran amok on Twitter and trended on Google for two days, prompting someone set things straight by posting to Chan’s official Facebook page that the actor was alive and working on a new film.

But Chan didn’t just die of a heart attack in March. Before the the rumor mill had finished generating its falsehoods, Chan had been killed in a snowboarding accident and had fallen off a cliff as well.

Among celebrity death hoaxes, the later two have become staples. According to Snopes.com, a website dedicated to tracking and investigating urban legends, the “snowboarding death hoax” is just another of the Internet-generated celebrity death hoaxes, many of which have seen their genesis through the same prank website. The “fell off a cliff” hoaxes are derivatives of the same theme. These hoaxes have killed Adam Sandler (several times), George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Natalie Portman, Eddie Murphy, and Avril Lavigne, to name just a few.

Snopes’ Barbara Mikkelson notes that if news outlets like CNN and the Associated Press are not “reporting the details of what, when, where and how of a famous person’s grim reapering,” chances are the story is a hoax.

Although Jackie Chan now joins the celebrity death list of stars that have died in multiple hoaxes, he still has to die several more times to catch celebrities like Justin Bieber, who is constantly getting himself killed online. The teen singing sensation was pronounced dead via the Internet, on Twitter, and Facebook a half-dozen times inside of a year beginning in August 2009.

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Note: This was written by a Yahoo! contributor. Join the Yahoo! Contributor Network here to start publishing your own articles.


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