BERLIN — A hoax video showing Michael Jackson emerging from a coroner’s van was an experiment aimed at showing how quickly misinformation and conspiracy theories can race across the Internet, German broadcaster RTL said Tuesday.
The video was posted on YouTube for a single day a week ago and received 880,000 hits. It has since been picked up around the world.
“We wanted to show how easily users can be manipulated on the Internet with hoax videos,” spokeswoman Heike Schultz said. “Therefore, we created this video of Michael Jackson being alive, even though everybody knows by now that he is dead — and the response was breathtaking.”
Jackson died June 25 in Los Angeles.
“Unfortunately, many people believed it was true,” Schultz said. “Even though we tried to create the video in a way that every normal user can see right away that it is a fake.”
