Thaindian News

By Madhuri Dey
According to the sources, a hoax video persistently showing Michael Jackson emerging from a Coroner’s van has been the latest buzz among the netizens. The video which has been uploaded in the online video portal called Youtube has received as many as 8.80,000 hits, before the broadcasters pulled off the video from the website.

According to the sources, the video was an experiment aimed at portraying how rapidly misinformation and conspiracy theories can spread across the Internet, German broadcasters RTL said on Tuesday. “We wanted to show how easily users can be manipulated on the Internet with hoax videos. Therefore, we created this video of Michael Jackson being alive, even though everybody knows by now that he is dead - and the response was breathtaking,” said spokeswoman Heike Schultz of Cologne-based RTL.

Posted under “unanonymous source”, the video portrays a coroner’s van entering in a parking garage and the late King Of Pop getting out of the van with another person. The video looks amateurish and is incorporated with poor lighting and sound. “Unfortunately many believed the video to be true. Even though we tried to create the video in a way that every normal user can see right away that it is a fake,” said Schultz.

According to Schultz, the video was reportedly shot near Cologne. The van in the aforementioned video had the name printed as “CORONER” suggesting that it has been recorded in America. But several questions have come up regarding the alleged use of MJ’s brand name in the video. Reacting to that Schultz said, “We didn’t want to disrespect Michael Jackson but we needed a strong name to get this experiment going. Had we used Britney Spears, the fans of Britney would have complained.”