Daniel Radcliffe’s publicist has been forced to deny the former Harry Potter star has contracted coronavirus.
A tweet from a fake BBC News account claiming Daniel was the “first famous person” to publicly confirm testing positive to coronavirus quickly went viral. This was in part thanks to staffers from the New York Times and Politico sharing the tweet, both of whom have since apologised.
The Twitter account @Bbcnewstonight has since been suspended for platform manipulation. Although the account had 125 followers at the time of false claim, the tweet racked up over 311,000 impressions and 70,000 engagements in its seven hours of life before being removed by Twitter.
BuzzFeed reached out to the owners of the account to ask the main question on everyone’s mind: “Why?”
The anonymous operators of the account provided a number of mostly nonsense reasons, like, “The internet is lowering people’s IQs” and “We are training people to be more tech savvy”.
They insisted they targeted Daniel Radcliffe arbitrarily, but also considered giving fake coronavirus to Pamela Anderson, David Hasselhoff and Megan Fox. They apparently wanted someone really famous, but “not famous enough to be unbelievable”.
Daniels reps simply answered “Not true” to the viral virus claim.
We will keep you updated on Daniel’s coronavirus status through the near future. Until then:
