The day Twitter killed Savater and Perales: this is how hoaxes about the death of celebrities spread

José Luis Perales, in a capture of a video broadcast by his social networks.

For a while, José Luis Perales was dead. The 78-year-old singer-songwriter, author of such iconic songs as A sailboat called freedom, said goodbye to the stage last April and to this world on August 7 at nine in the afternoon due to a heart attack. Various media picked up the news, the networks were filled with messages of mourning for the loss of this pillar of Spanish music. “First Friedkin and now Perales, this Monday is a disgrace,” commented a user on Twitter (now known as X) sharing one of the many news items announcing the death of the Spaniard. But when he had been dead for half an hour, José Luis Perales came back to life. He did it from his social networks, with a video in which he announced that he was in London having dinner with his son. “Suddenly, we find that someone, with a very bad idea, has said that I have died. And the truth is that I am more alive than ever, happier than ever, and that tomorrow we will see each other again in Spain ”, he explained.

The original tweet that gave rise to the hoax has already been deleted, as well as a large part of the publications that followed it. Only the messages of farewell and disbelief remain due to the death of the famous. But the first are the ones they answered from 8:52 p.m. (Spanish peninsular time) to Grandma Garcia, a humor account located in Mexico, which with 127,000 followers could be the first to spread the hoax through a tweet, which is no longer available. The same account, once the news was denied, began to post memes about the resurrection of Perales.

Summer is an ideal time to capture attention. The news agenda is at half throttle and it is easier for false news to go viral. In fact, Perales was not the only one to die falsely this Monday. A few hours before, it was the turn of the philosopher and writer Fernando Savater, who told the @EditoriaIAriel —a fake copy of the true Editorial Ariel, which publishes the books of the San Sebastian- left for dead at 2:35 p.m. Both the tweet and the account, which according to the Internet Archive platform was created in February 2023, disappeared after a few minutes. However, as it was the only account that spread the hoax, Savater’s false death did not achieve the same media coverage as Perales’s.

Serial liar on networks

It is not the first time that celebrities end up dying on networks while they are still alive in the real world. It was the turn of former President Felipe González a few months ago, followed by a single day difference by the also politician Elena Salgado. In 2020, two years before his actual death, it was the turn of Javier Marías. In this case, similar to what happened with Savater, the ad was given by a false account from the Alfaguara publishing house. Writers Mario Vargas Llosa, Isabel Allende and JK Rowling add to the list.

A screenshot of the tweet that gave the news of the false death of the writer Fernando Savater.

The news of their false deaths are linked to each other because they were spread by the same author, the “Italian champion of lies” Tommaso Debenedetti, as he himself defined himself in an interview with this newspaper. To filter his hoaxes, he creates false accounts such as the Ariel publishing house, posing as other people or entities with a certain relevance, so that the most distracted users find it difficult to immediately understand that it is a lie. When the hoax has already gone viral on the networks, the Italian claims responsibility for the troll with the message “false account created by the Italian journalist Tommasso Debenedetti.” That was what happened in the case of Savater, with a tweet that has already deleted. A few weeks ago, he tried to sneak the death of the writer Arturo Pérez-Reverte.

“The objective of these accounts is almost always reduced to getting attention in the form of likes or an audience, even if it is temporary. They simply want to be listened to,” explains network expert Marcelino Madrigal. In this specific case, everything seems to indicate that the hoax originated in Latin America, since it was the capitals of this region —and of Mexico in particular— that spread the news of the singer-songwriter’s death en masse. Although the articles have been deleted, the trail of the publications shared by users remains on Twitter.

“Actually, it is most likely that the hoax reached Twitter at a second moment, and that it originated from messaging applications,” adds Madrigal. Beyond what we see on public networks, such as tweets that are published and deleted, these fake news have an unknown life in messaging applications, where they circulate without attribution, and can both spread and be the origin of these hoaxes.

Although the disappearance of the true verified accounts on Twitter makes it more difficult to know at a glance if it is a reliable source, there are some clues that can facilitate this task. For example, by looking carefully at the account name, which is usually very similar to the medium it is impersonating, even if it only changes one letter (in the case of Ariel publishing house, a capital Latin i instead of an L). It is also important to look at the account creation date (suspicious if it has just been created), the number of tweets (sometimes it is the first to be published) and the profile description, since in many cases they are usually the first to clarify that it is a parody or a humorous account.

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