Whenever I log on to Twitter, I take a peek at the trending topics to see what people are tweeting about. For those of you unfamiliar with Twitter's trending topics, the idea is that when a high number of users are all tweeting a similar phrase, such as 'earthquake in Chile!', that phrase is highlighted as trending, and users are then able to view all of the tweets related to the phrase. It's like having access to a worldwide water cooler.
So yesterday, I noticed that 'Caught Lip-Syncing Speech' was a trending topic. When I checked out the listing of related tweets, I saw that people were all linking to the same video on The Onion, which you can see here:
Obama Caught Lip-Synching Speech
I've seen other particularly funny Onion articles show up as trending topics in the past, so this didn't surprise me. The articles spread around like funny email forwards. Looking closer though, I realized that many of the people tweeting about the video actually thought it was real.
Sample Tweets
"Obama was caught lip-syncing a speech?!"
"The Obama Milli Vanilli speech, his lips stop but we still hear him."
"HAHA President Obama caught LIP-SYNCING a speech: (Thank You, @theonion)"
"Obama Caught Lip-Syncing Speech: President Obama is the new Ashlee Simpson."
It is mind numbing that people would take a satirical article and believe that it was real news, but then again, I guess a lot of people believe that Fox News is real too. So there you go.