6 B.S. Stories That Fooled Everyone on Facebook (8/5/14)

6 Smartphones Aren't Making Restaurant Service Slower

Those gosh darn millennials with their car mustaches and dang wine cozies, all tanning off their ever-present smartphones instead of socially interacting with each other -- they are just the worst. And sure, while this has literally been said about every new generation since the dawn of media, it looks like we've finally found that smoking gun:

Eat that, millennials ... only you can't, because you're all too busy taking pictures of it. That's what a study carried out by the owner of a "popular restaurant" in NYC found out when he supposedly compared tapes from 2004 and 2014: Ten years ago, everyone enjoyed their meal, talked to each other, and generally looked like better, more spiritually fulfilled people (you remember 2004, right?), while now it's all Instagrams, selfies, and feasting on the rotting carcass of common sense and good values.

Just ask the anonymous Craigslist post that all of these stories are citing:

Yep, that's seriously the only "proof" that Washington Post, Consumerist, Gothamist, and NY Daily News needed to blast the "idiot smartphone generation": a completely unsourced and anonymous "study" posted on the sketchiest site of all mankind blaming poor service on the customers -- despite Slate rounding up a healthy handful of actual New York restaurant owners saying the complete opposite of this. In fact, some of them even like getting photos of their dishes plastered on social media for free. But what do they know? If it's not a faceless block of hyperbolic text blaming the new generation for every problem on a user submission webpage, then it's not worth knowing.

5 What? No, Smelling Farts Doesn't Cure Cancer

We're pretty certain that if the entire Internet took one of those "Which Back to the Future Character Are You?" personality quizzes, it would get a tie between Biff Tannen and the open pile of manure that Biff Tannen perpetually face-plants into. Here's our evidence:

Looks like all the men reading this have been secretly rescuing their wives with those late night blanket bombs, are we right, fellas? Don't answer that. For one, it's a little sexist (women can lay stink bombs, too), but also, we're totally not right. Neither are Yahoo, Huffington Post, UPI, and Gawker -- all of which are citing a study published by the Medicinal Chemistry Communications journal, who actually went out of their way to stress that the test of applying hydrogen sulfide directly to cancer cells under lab conditions is literally nothing like syphoning ass vapor directly into your lungs. So Jezebel, for instance, apparently saw this:

And turned it into this:

In fact, one of the professors involved even stressed that it would be a scientific loss if the only thing the media got out of this was some fart-related headlines ... to which the media glazed over like a Dumb & Dumber bit before jumping up and down and making farting sounds into their elbows. We get it, guys. Farts are hilarious. But slightly less so when they're, y'know, setting back human progress.

4 The "Accidental Text" Wedding Photo Is From a Rap Video

With every year that passes, our news organizations become more indistinguishable from Cheezburger.com. For example, a couple of weeks ago, this adorable viral photo ...

... inspired a whole bunch of news sites to dust off one of the deadliest weapons in modern journalism: the hashtag-using headline.

The entire elaborate story -- passed on by Fox, People, the Daily Mail, and your Facebook news feed -- comes entirely from a stranger's Instagram picture, which coincidentally was ripped off by time travelers and posted to Reddit months ago, before the Langoliers got their fill. At some point, the New York Post added the fact that the story takes place in England, because, what the hell, it might as well.

This would have ended up like the dozens of "real" and "hilarious" texts that go viral, if it wasn't for the fact that it features real people, and real people tend to mind when you make up bullshit about them -- especially if everyone got it completely backward. The "wedding crashers" are actually a rap group that was shooting this music video in Detroit when the wedding party photobombed them to take some pictures in the same place. So, yes, whoever made up that text message is full of crap, and just a wincy bit racist for automatically assuming the black guys were the uninvited party guests and not the other way around.

3 Coolio Isn't Releasing His Next Album Through a Porn Site

Look, no one enjoys bringing up Coolio, not even Coolio, but our digital hands were forced on this one:

Sheesh, as if the news wasn't depressing enough lately. The story, first reported by TMZ, made it all the way to the Guardian through sites like Gizmodo, Complex, and AV Club reporting on the Batman & Robin star's glorious return, understandably sandwiched with tits like some kind of terrible medicine mixed with syrup to make you swallow it. The entire concept of a PornHub album seems ill-advised to everyone -- Coolio included, who, as it turns out, is simply shooting a commercial for the porn company, as one does, and not releasing all his future music through them. As he told Rolling Stone, "If I want to see porn, I'll put a mirror next to my bed."

Shockingly enough, when you trust a sleazy website filled with human misery that is packed butthole to eyebrows with legal problems (we mean TMZ, not PornHub), it sometimes backfires on you. Seriously, how dare they bring down the name of an American institution that has brought so many hours of joy to so many people? (Now we do mean PornHub.)

2 Justin Bieber Didn't Fake Being in a Wheelchair to Cut in Line at Disney

There are already plenty of reasons to hate Justin Bieber: he's famous, and has money, and makes music (sorry, forgot the sarcastic quotation marks) that teenagers enjoy, and so on. A true motherfucker. Well, here's a new one:

Yes, apparently the Jibs (as his fans call him) read our old article about the wheelchair black market at Disney and decided to get himself some of that action, according to Daily Caller, the Wire, and Inquisitr. However, this story proves less what a cat anus Bie-stin (as his fans call him) is and more about how willing we are to accept that fact in the face of impossibility: Specifically, the impossibility that DJ-JB (as his fans calls him), being the fame-cancer that he is, would even need to cut in line. Hell, he could get half the kids in Disney to form a pyramid for him if he wanted to.

The real headline here is "Teen Star Photographed in Wheelchair at Disney, TMZ Intern Forced to Come Up With Story" -- although even the originally cited article at TMZ points out the fact that B.I.E.B.ertron-2000 isn't actually cutting in line, and has injured his leg playing basketball. But shucks, that kind of information would require reading past the first paragraph, so it's "fuck the Biebs" all around.

1 A Dude Didn't Book Seats on Both Malaysia Flights and Change His Mind

With every unthinkable tragedy comes a series of what we think are unthinkable results, such as tasteless ads, horrendous celebrity jokes, and of course the butt-clenching "near miss" story. This was no different for the fallen Malaysian flights this year, courtesy of Fox, Parade, National Post, ABC News, Huffington Post, and freaking everyone else:

There's just one thing. Notice how the headlines can't decide if he actually booked a flight? That's because this Dutch biker has gone silent about the whole thing since the story first ran, the only evidence that it happened at all coming from his blog and a single account given to a local station. But, as the good people of Slate have pointed out, nowhere in the harrowing tale does he even so much as mention that he had booked a seat on the lost MH17, just that he was considering flying on that day. As for the other near miss: He was flying in the general direction of the missing plane, so, you know, that counts as "booking a flight" too, right? Never mind the fact that boarding MH370 would have required a 1,500-mile detour.

While we're at it: You know the story about the 100 "top AIDS researchers" who died in the second plane? That actual number, according to the same enlightening Slate article, is more like six. Despite that, this story was shared so widely that even this guy repeated it:

So congratulations, bullshit news! You made it! You rule the world now!