#hoaxes — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #hoaxes, aggregated by home.social.
-
When Britain Loved Being Fooled.
There is something wonderfully human about a good hoax.
Not fraud, exactly – fraud wants your money. Forgery wants you to believe that something newly made is old, valuable, or authentic. A practical joke wants a laugh, preferably at somebody else’s expense.
A hoax wants something slightly different.
It wants you to believe. For just long enough.
It is a woman who claims to have given birth to rabbits. A mysterious foreign princess who appears from nowhere speaking a language nobody recognises. A newly discovered document written by one of the greatest names in English literature. Or an advertisement promising that, on a particular evening at a particular theatre, a man will climb into an ordinary wine bottle.
All you really need is somebody prepared to tell the story.
And somebody prepared to believe it.
Britain has always been rather good at providing both.
The word hoax itself seems to have appeared in English towards the end of the eighteenth century and is probably related to hocus or hocus-pocus – the language of the conjuror, the juggler and the trickster. But before hoax became fashionable, there was another splendid word for much the same thing:humbug
recorded in the middle of the eighteenth century for a trick, deception or imposition.
The words may have changed, but the practice certainly wasn’t new. People have always lied to one another. What makes a hoax interesting is not necessarily the lie. It is what happens next.
Because the best hoaxes rarely succeed simply because the person behind them is an exceptionally talented liar. They succeed because the lie arrives at exactly the right moment, in exactly the right form, and tells its audience something they are already prepared – perhaps even desperate – to believe.
That is where things become interesting.
We sometimes look back at historical hoaxes with a certain amount of smugness.
How could anyone possibly have believed that?
It is an easy question to ask when you already know the answer. Strip away that hindsight and things become considerably less comfortable.
Imagine being presented with an object apparently dug from the earth, accompanied by a convincing story about exactly where it was found. You know that similar objects exist. You know that important discoveries are being made. Perhaps another respected expert has already expressed an interest in it.
Would you dismiss it immediately? Or would you look a little closer?
In Victorian London, two Thames mudlarks called William Smith and Charles Eaton – better known as Billy and Charley – discovered that there was considerably more money to be made manufacturing history than digging it out of the mud.
Beginning in 1857, the pair produced supposedly medieval objects in hand-cut moulds: medallions, badges, figures and other curiosities decorated with strange images and wonderfully garbled inscriptions. They then sold them as antiquities recovered during excavations at Shadwell.
There were clues. Quite a lot of clues, actually. Some objects carried dates written in Arabic numerals despite supposedly belonging to the eleventh century. The inscriptions were nonsense. The designs were peculiar. Yet the objects found buyers.
When archaeologist Henry Cuming publicly denounced them as forgeries in 1858, the resulting controversy even ended up in court. Remarkably, respected antiquary Charles Roach Smith remained convinced that the objects were genuine. Part of his reasoning was effectively that no forger would produce anything so ridiculous.
Unfortunately, Billy and Charley would. Eventually some of their moulds were obtained and displayed at the Society of Antiquaries. The game was up – although the pair continued producing their creations for years afterwards. They made several thousand objects in total.
Today, examples are held by the British Museum. I love that they are exhibited there… as fakes… A worthless fake made to imitate a valuable antiquity survives long enough to become a valuable historical object in its own right.
But Billy and Charley understood something important. People don’t simply believe objects. They believe stories. Give an object a convincing provenance and it changes. A battered piece of metal becomes something recovered from an archaeological excavation. A scrap of handwriting becomes a lost manuscript. A photograph becomes evidence. An ordinary woman in unusual clothes becomes a princess. Sometimes the desire to believe becomes powerful enough to overcome evidence sitting directly in front of us.
It happens to experts too. Especially to experts.
Expertise does not make someone immune to deception. Occasionally it can provide the very framework that makes the deception convincing. A successful forger learns what an expert expects to see and gives it to them.
Collectors can be particularly vulnerable because rarity creates competition. The British Museum notes that wealthy collectors and fierce competition for spectacular antiquities historically created precisely the sort of market in which fakes flourished. When spectacular genuine objects were unavailable, forgers copied them, invented them or even took genuine antiquities and “improved” them with modern additions.
And that brings us to one of the most important ingredients in any successful hoax.
Want. Someone has to want the thing to be true.
The collector wants the extraordinary artefact. The scholar wants the discovery. The newspaper wants the sensational story. The audience wants to see the impossible performance. The believer wants the photograph to show something extraordinary. And sometimes the person being fooled has invested so much – money, reputation, pride or simple emotional attachment – that admitting the truth becomes harder than continuing to believe the lie.
That is why the revelation of a hoax is often almost as fascinating as the hoax itself.
Some victims laugh or become furious. Some quietly disappear while others double down spectacularly. And occasionally the hoax escapes from its creator altogether.
A joke repeated often enough becomes a story. The story is copied into books. Those books become sources for later books. Details change. Names appear. Locations shift. Someone adds something they heard from their grandmother. Eventually the person who started the whole thing could stand up and announce that they invented it and somebody, somewhere, would probably accuse them of participating in the cover-up.
At that point the hoax has become folklore. That is why old hoaxes remain so fascinating.
They aren’t really stories about stupid people being fooled by clever people.
They’re stories about trust. About authority. About reputation. About fashion. About the things a society considers possible at a particular moment in history. And, most of all, about belief.
Over the coming week, Mysterious Times will be looking at some extraordinary examples.
There will be rabbits.
There will be Shakespeare.
There will be a mysterious princess.
There will be an allegedly impossible theatrical performance.
And before we’re finished, one unfortunate London address is going to have a very, very bad day.
Some of the people we meet will be fraudsters. Some will be practical jokers. Some will begin with a relatively small deception and discover, rather too late, that it has grown completely beyond their control.
And plenty of intelligent, educated and perfectly sensible people will fall for them.Welcome to Fakes, Frauds and Fabulous Hoaxes.
#Belief #BillyAndCharley #BritishHistory #CuriousBritain #FakesAndFrauds #Folklore #Forgery #HistoricalHoaxes #Hoaxes #MysteriousTimes #strangeHistory #VictorianBritain
And remember – before we laugh too loudly at our ancestors, perhaps we should ask ourselves one question.
If we’d been there…
would we? -
"Operation 'Conserve': Canned Pretext for War
From Nazi Fabrication to Iraq War Lies, Exposing Hollow Justifications for Conflict
On the night of August 31, 1939, Nazi SS officers stormed a German radio transmitter and broadcast anti-German propaganda in Polish. Prisoners forcibly taken from concentration camps were dressed in Polish military uniforms before being executed. This was a staged provocation to frame Poland as having attacked Germany, creating a pretext for invasion. The operation was codenamed 'Conserve,' meaning 'canned food.' At dawn on September 1, the following day, German warships bombarded the Westerplatte Fortress in Gdańsk, marking the start of World War II.
Every war in human history has a stated justification. Yet history later reveals these justifications are often flimsy pretexts.
(. . .)
The U.S. launched airstrikes on Baghdad citing Iraq’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction. But a Central Intelligence Agency report one and a half years later concluded simply: such weapons never existed. 'Bombs away is your punishment.' With the pretext for invasion gone, only the tragedy of war remained.
(. . .)
Alfred Naujocks, the SS officer who commanded Operation Conserve, confessed in his Nuremberg Trials testimony that the raid was fabricated. Naujocks lived without punishment and died of natural causes in Hamburg in 1966. Between the man who confessed and those sacrificed in the operation, only one name remains remembered."
https://www.chosun.com/english/opinion-en/2026/08/30/QJKSPJWUA5E5ZCXAFAI6TULUCA/
-
In October 1869, the Cardiff Giant, a ten-foot-tall figure, was revealed as a hoax by George Hull, who aimed to challenge biblical literals. Despite being exposed, the giant fueled fascination and reinforced myths of giants in America. #giants #hoaxes https://connectparanormal.net/2026/08/09/cardiff-giant-hoax-and-the-myth-of-ancient-giants/
-
Lincoln Journal Star: Bomb threat at York County school turns out to be AI hoax. “The York County Sheriff’s Office responded to the bomb threat at Nebraska Evangelical Lutheran High School in Waco just after 1 p.m. Thursday. School personnel believe an unknown male called the school’s main line saying explosive devices had been placed inside and outside the building. After searching the school […]
https://rbfirehose.com/2026/07/04/lincoln-journal-star-bomb-threat-at-york-county-school-turns-out-to-be-ai-hoax/ -
"Hoaxes Keep Escaping Containment
A delusional U.S. president is helping thin the line between fiction and reality.
Donald Trump seems fixated on the notion of the hoax. He has repeatedly sought to dismiss the unfolding Epstein scandal as a 'Democrat hoax that never ends,' designed to distract from his triumphs. Since returning to the White House, he has dismissed green energy as a 'scam,' climate change as 'the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,' and the concept of a carbon footprint as 'a hoax made up by people with evil intentions'—all in one speech to the United Nations. At the same time, however, the president frequently posts fake content as if it were real, such as AI-generated images and false claims about his political opponents.
But in his conviction that anything that favors the other side is a fake, and anything that supports his worldview is real, Trump may not be that far from the average American. Hoaxes have been part of U.S. political life since the Founding Fathers, from the forgeries concocted by Benjamin Franklin to smear the British during the Revolutionary War to a series of bogus academic articles intended to undermine so-called grievance studies in 2017 and 2018. But they also have a life of their own, and tend to outrun their creators, as one particularly enduring example shows: a hoax concocted in the late 1960s by satirists intent on forcing Americans to confront the insanity of the Vietnam War.
When it was published in 1967, Report from Iron Mountain purported to be a secret government-commissioned study leaked by one of its authors. It warned that if permanent global peace broke out, the U.S. economy and society would collapse. To replace the stabilizing effects of war, young men would need to be forced into 'a sophisticated form of slavery' and made to compete in 'blood games.' It might be necessary to revive eugenics. To cow the population, new threats would have to be created, such as alien scares or the destruction of the environment.
The 'leaked' 'report' made the front page of the New York Times, and provoked internal investigations in the White House, the Defense Department, and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. U.S. embassies were warned to disavow the report, for fear of adverse international reaction."
-
Pizzagate's role in viral disinformation
https://negativepid.blog/pizzagates-role-in-viral-disinformation/#pizzagate #conspiracies #socialMedia #radicalization #politics #hoaxes #extremism #fringeTheories #misinformation #disinformation #negativepid
-
Pizzagate's role in viral disinformation
https://negativepid.blog/pizzagates-role-in-viral-disinformation/#pizzagate #conspiracies #socialMedia #radicalization #politics #hoaxes #extremism #fringeTheories #misinformation #disinformation #negativepid
-
Internet fandoms: fun and radicalization
https://negativepid.blog/internet-fandoms-from-fun-to-radicalization/
#fandoms #socialMedia #radicalization #politics #hoaxes #extremism #fringeTheories #misinformation #disinformation #negativepid