adminfalse claims on the African news site, SpyGhana, which originally reported the false claim.
“I am still a man and I have always been fully in touch with my masculinity and have no intention of becoming a woman,” Tyson (46) has since been quoted as saying.
“The claims are not only untrue but unbelievably stupid. I was at the Pacquiao-Marquez fight on Saturday and any reasonable person could tell I was looking like a man.”
The NewsBiscuit story, “Mike Tyson sex change operation a ‘complete success’, say surgeons” was published in late November and spread like wildfire after The Standard in Zimbabwe and SpyGhana both reported the news as fact. Investigative news site Zambia Watchdog is also believed to have published the story, but the story was allegedly removed from the site after the truth came out, according to the Daily Mirror. A leftover link now leads to an inactive webpage.
One of the quotes attributed to Tyson in the false sex-change story reads: “Some people might think it strange that I’m now a woman. But even at the height of my career, when pound for pound I was regarded as the best fighter in the world, I never lost touch with my feminine side and knew that one day I would grow breasts and have a v*****a.”
The original spoof story claims Tyson wanted to replace his long-standing nickname of “Iron Mike” with “Iron Maiden” and changed his name from Mike to Michelle following a 16-hour sex-change operation.
The spreading of false media reports has become fairly common as of late, as the demand for immediate breaking news has grown among media outlets.
On November 14, The Onion published a satirical story calling North Korea’s leader Kim Jung-Un the world’s sexiest man alive for 2012. The online version of China’s communist newspaper, The People’s Daily, reported the spoof story as fact. On November 29, a made-up story about Google acquiring a WiFi company for US$400 million, spread across the web and was reported as fact by the Associated Press and TechCrunch. CNN later that day reported the story was false.
NewsBiscuit, the British “News Satire, Satire, Parody News” site which published the Tyson spoof story, states on its FAQ page that “All we’re doing is doing some fake news with a slightly British prospective.”
“We’ve had half as many visitors from Africa in the last few days as we’d expect generally in a whole month,” comic writer John O’Farrell of NewsBiscuit told the BBC.
NewsBiscuit is one of many spoof news sites. — Daily Mail.
Online Reporter