Bill Cosby is dead

At 1:19am on Saturday, 02/06/10, Anonymous posted on /b/ telling everyone to post "RIP Bill Cosby" on Facebook and Twitter and to disseminate fake information that Bill Cosby had died. Very shortly, Facebook and Twitter were flooded with the false information and a Facebook group was created, which received over 300 members within the first hour. Although the Wikipedia page for Bill Cosby was locked, the Spanish Wikipedia page was quickly altered. Several back stories was created on /b/, the consensus being that Mr. Cosby had been found lying on his kitchen floor by neighbors/loved ones who called paramedics who took him to a hospital where he was pronounced dead from apparent heart failure. Various shoops of news pages were created and posted on the Facebook group, which had over 700 members by the third hour. "Bill Cosby" became the number one topic on Twitter and "Bill Cosby Dead" became a top search topic on Google.

By 5:00am, the information was generally being labeled as a hoax, despite efforts to silence naysayers, although there was still some confusion and belief. As of 5:00pm, 02/06/10, the Facebook group has over 1200 members.

Lifespan

The hoax trended on Twitter for roughly three hours.

The hoax was quickly debunked by sites like associatedcontent.com, and tweetmeme.com.