The Saddest, Goofiest, Facepalmiest Hoaxes of 2013

If there’s an internet god, 2013 will go down as the year we learned to think before we retweeted.

Hoaxes were everywhere this year. They ranged from the small—a quote misattributed to a celebrity—to the large—a man lying to a major news magazine about a terrorist attack. Some, like a doctored restaurant receipt, appear to have been perpetrated out of self interest; some, like the torrent of fake articles from sub-Onion websites, were professionally mass-produced; another, in which a fictional woman was berated on Twitter, sprung to life out of sheer misanthropy. And there was the occasional—fake cancer football girlfriend!—that seem to have germinated in some genuine human emotion, even if they eventually smothered it.

Given the range and variety of hoaxes, this list makes no attempt at a unified field theory of media deception. The methodology is borrowed from a recent piece by Bobbie Johnson in Medium: “None of these stories were really true, and none of the authors admitted it until they were caught.”

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