Hoaxes On The Internet Debunked, Ranging From IS Militant Having Sex With Donkey To Child-Brides In Norway

There are several Web sites dedicated to debunking Internet hoaxes, while some publications have made it a weekly feature to belie these false stories that, ironically, even become viral even if most of them sound ridiculous.

The Washington Post listed eight such hoaxes and demolished their claim to truthfulness one by one.

Topping the daily's last week hoax was a US drone allegedly capturing footage of an Islamic State militant in Syria having sex with an animal. The report came out initially on LiveLeak and then Reddit, showing a male having sex with the pixelated image of an animal, said to be either a donkey or goat. Although foreign workers who had been deployed in the Middle East have shared stories of men having sex with desert animals such as camels, this specific instances comes under question mark because of the dubious details such as the date stamp on the video being 2011 and the time zone corresponding to Kabul, not Syria.

The video has gone viral with more than 250,000 hits.

YouTube/TheLipTV

Another viral hoax was that the Ebola Virus is a bioweapon created in the US that could make the dead live again. The hoax actually uses images from the movie World War Z, which the news hoax site Big American News even headlined: "Obama is infecting Christmas with Ebola to destroy Jesus and start a new age of liberal darkness. Shared on Facebook over half a million times, the hoax is definitely a timely one as latest report said that Ebola has reached Spain and the US, while killing several thousands of victims in Africa.

The supposed third case of Ebola victim rising from the dead has its roots in two news reports in All Africa and The New Dawn, regional publications, that claimed Doris Qui of Hope Village Community and Ma Kebeh rose from the dead on their way to their own burial. The twin resurrection incidents allegedly happened in Nimba County in Liberia.

YouTube/World's Largest Blackheads & Whiteheads

Riding high on the Ebola scare, a local blog by Tony Botello caused an Internet-wide panic when it reported on Saturday that an infected patient is now quarantined at Kansas City's Research Medical Center. The Washington Post clarified that the center had a patient from Nigeria with high fever, but he did not have other Ebola symptoms.

Another interesting hoax is that of a 12-year-old Norwegian girl named Thea who allegedly married a man 25 years older than her. With 2 million tweets reacting to the hoax and calls for the country's child services to intervene, the daily said it was only a publicity stunt for Plan Norway, a children's rights advocacy group which had claimed that daily, 39,000 minor girls are forced into marriage.

YouTube/Wild child

However, it should be pointed out that in some Asian and Middle Eastern cultures, there really are child-brides.

YouTube/We Fucking Love Atheism