7 Fake Viral Photos You Probably Thought Were Real

7 The #HoldACokeWithYourBoobs Challenge Is A Chesty Lie

You may have noticed that the human bosom is universally admired in a way that transcends time, space, time zones, death and punctuation. (Notice how we forgot that Oxford comma? Look!) The people behind #HoldACokeWithYourBoobs noticed this too and decided to spark a campaign encouraging ladies to nestle icy refreshments betwixt their cleavage, not unlike the most confusing burlesque sponsorship deal ever.

Hashtag movements are unique in the sense that they usually have very little to do with what cause they are supporting, so when it came out that the ladies in the above images were trying to raise funds for breast cancer survivors, nobody thought it was strange or unbelievable, because bazooms.

But things got downright surreal when it was further revealed that #HoldACokeWithYourBoobs was in no way associated with any breast cancer charities. In fact, it's been straight-up disavowed by the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, like a captured secret agent. Turns out that the act of motorboarding cold ones was actually conceived by a pair of chuckleheads in the adult entertainment industry as a viral joke to prove how dumb viral challenges have become. As the hashtag ironically blew up, participants began assuming that they were doing it for some kind of boob-related cause (because why else would they be risking the nipple frostbite? Certainly not just for Internet fame; who would do that?

When the breast cancer connection was made, the creators simply ran with it, because they thought it was funny (particularly since none of the original images mention anything about breast cancer). In the end, zero charities received any kind of funding, and the Internet was left with a bunch of stray photos of soda-gripping mammaries. So ... we kind of broke even on this one? Either way -- anyone looking to actually donate to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation can click on this link here before pretending not to scroll back up to the sexually labyrinthine photo of a topless clown.

6 People Can't Stop Posting Dumb Photos Of Sharks In Floods

Now that our ecosystem is slowly transforming into a tornado of cockroach feces and cursed lava, it appears that we're not even bothering to take fresh pictures of the climate tragedy du jour, such as the ever-recycled cold snap lighthouse photo we get year after year. Or this:

That would be a theme park in Atlanta, which flooded back in 2009, still getting thousands of retweets with every new meteorological event. But hey, at least that's a real photo people are being tricked with and not an impossible Photoshop abomination featuring a shark, like this stupid piece of shit:

This image is currently enjoying at least 50,000 shares on Facebook, despite the fact that it is literally impossible -- Houston is about 20 or so miles from the nearest body of ocean water, and highway 249 is on the opposite side of the city. Unless Poseidon, Lord Of The Seas decides to punish the state of Texas by crushing half of it beneath the ocean, or we encounter a Sharknado-type situation, the only way a shark will ever be on highway 249 is if it falls out of the back of a freezer truck and slowly bakes on the asphalt in the hot sun.

Not only is this image of a tooling highway monster a total lie, but that exact shark has been showing up in pictures for years. Here it is murdering commuters in Puerto Rico. Here it is after Hurricane Sandy. Here it is after Hurricane Irene. Shit, we Photoshopped it into an article back in 2010:

It originally appeared in a genuinely striking 2005 Africa Geographic photo, before being clipped out and compulsively passed along like an oregano spliff:

5 Time Magazine's "Perfect Body" Photo From 1955 Is Actually A Modern Adult-Film Star

For some mysterious reason, the only way people on social media believe they can convince young women to not strive to look like bony dungeon wraiths is to constantly remind them how zaftig their grandmothers were. Regardless of how this trend got started, the end result is your social media feeds occasionally getting clogged up with black and white photographs of objectively gorgeous women, like this one:

According to the one meme that's all over Twitter as well as several Reddit threads, what you're seeing is Time's "definition of a perfect body" back in 1955. Apparently, the knowledge that large-breasted women with very little body fat were considered attractive during the Eisenhower administration struck a chord with many people. See, everyone? You don't have to obsess over your looks thanks to this old-timey photo of a woman who would be a supermodel in any era!

Here's the thing -- the woman in that picture is Aria Giovanni, an adult-film star born in 1977. So, the fact that her figure would be considered "perfect" in 1955 is somewhat less impressive than the time machine she must have built in order to appear in a magazine spread 22 years before she was born. Either her appearance in Time was a subtle clue, or the meme is bullshit.

Now, we're all for promoting healthy body images in young men and women, but can we really not think of a better way to do so outside of showing people with body dysmorphia photos of porn stars and then lying about their decade of origin?

4 Those "Crazy Conservative Quote" Memes Are Too Good To Be True

Now that the next presidential election is less than a year and a half away, it's time to have your Facebook feed engulfed by a relentless torrent of completely unsourced political memes that conveniently reinforce the beliefs of the individual posting them, without wasting time being "factual" or "accurate." It's called democracy, folks. And it looks like this:

Now, Mike Huckabee definitely came out in defense of Josh Duggar after it was revealed that Duggar molested several girls as a teenager, including two of his own sisters. Furthermore, Huckabee and Michele Bachmann are a pair of pretty divisive characters, and these quotes seem like things they would say, maybe. And there isn't a single photo of Bachmann in existence that doesn't appear as if she is trying to swallow beams of invisible starlight.

So it's no surprise these photos had zero trouble getting shared and retweeted after being initially spread by a totally impartial Facebook group named "Stop The Tea Party." Even political figureheads like the lady from Scream got in on the action:

The catch (if you haven't already figured it out) is that every single one of these quotes is 100 percent fabricated in a backward effort to discredit the upcoming GOP candidates by creating easily fact-checkable memes that no one will actually bother to fact-check. Luckily, Snopes.com called them out on their little game -- to which the Tea Party poopers released this (we shit you not):

That's right -- they responded to Snopes.com blowing the whistle on their fabricated quotes by releasing a fabricated quote from Snopes.com, because reality is apparently a $14 made-for-TV remake of George Orwell's 1984.

3 Japan Doesn't Have A Cube-Shaped-Dog Craze

Western media has such a grotesque fetish for funny foreigners that the Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal can post a photo gallery of Chinese people sleeping in an IKEA and no one will bat an eyelash. And, as we've pointed out in the past, our need to chuckle at cartoonishly naive distant lands persistently overpowers the most basic of reasoning skills -- such as blindly accepting any photo handed to us as the truth:

According to Boing Boing, Uproxx, and MTV, what you're seeing is the "new Japanese craze" of grooming dogs to look like cube-shaped Minecraft characters -- a sweeping phenomenon irrefutably backed up by the following handful of photographs and headlines:

To recap, those are three photographs. Three. With no context whatsoever. And that is enough proof to run articles breathlessly reporting on Japan's hilarious new obsession with cubist pooches, blank-faced and feebly cursing their purgatorial existence as nature's punchline. It's not as if a simple Google Image search could prove otherw-

Oh, OK. So, according to this Bored Panda headline, which predates the others by two months, the "grooming your dog into geometric riddles" trend is actually from Taiwan. However, despite being labeled as a nationwide trend, all of the images came from a single pet-grooming shop, because in media-speak the word "trend" usually means "this happened one time, but whatever."

So that means the only photo in the "Japanese Dog-Cubing Craze" articles that actually came from Japan was just that first one, of the noble boxhound standing on a green table.

Well, here's the thing:

Notice anything weird? Look again:

Yeah. That's a fake dog. According to that hard-hitting reverse image search the media has somehow yet to discover, the first photo we showed you, which catapulted the entire story, is a practice dummy used in a grooming contest back in 2012. This means that the entire "Japan loves to shave dogs as cubes" narrative was born out of precisely zero instances of anyone in Japan actually shaving a dog into a cube.

2 This "Nightmare" Wedding Proposal Didn't Offend Anyone Actually Involved

People love zany wedding proposals almost as much as they love forming angry mobs, so it should come as no surprise that the following image got nearly 3 million hate-clicks since it was posted on Imgur:

This single, four-word post was all the Internet needed to explode like a showboating pro-wrestler bursting from a body bag. People feverishly pelted this anonymous couple with a fiery rain of shame, casting a pox on them forever for having the gall to stage a proposal at someone else's wedding. Just look at how devastated the bride is in the background, now that her special day has been hijacked by a couple of spotlight-hungry assholes:

That's clearly the look of a thoroughly embarrassed woman, teetering on the verge of hot jealousy tears. Or, as the bride herself would later explain when somebody bothered to ask her, the look of a person who is overjoyed that her friend just got engaged.

Yeah, you see, the "rude" proposal that ruined this bride's wedding and earned the wrath of the Internet (despite the fact that, to everyone who angrily commented on it, all the people in the photograph are total fucking strangers) was actually the bride's idea. This should teach us a lesson about not getting ourselves whipped up into a howling, frothy rage over completely anonymous sources sharing photographs of completely anonymous people with outrageous captions, but it won't, because we are all monsters.

1 Caitlyn Jenner Didn't "Beat" An Army Veteran For An ESPN Award

Caitlyn Jenner, after making her first public appearance as a woman, has been bestowed the ESPY Awards' Arthur Ashe Courage Award for having the bravery to come out as transgender after having been a famous male Olympic athlete and television star, and, to a lesser extent, for having the courage to spell her name with a "y" instead of a more traditional vowel. Because the Internet is a terrible place that disallows anyone's love and happiness, regardless of how few people are even remotely affected by it, the following meme was birthed from the mess of despair like an orcish hellbeast:

According to the blaring anuses who reposted this canned rhetoric thousands of times on Facebook and Twitter, an Army veteran named Noah Galloway was neck-and-neck in the running with Jenner for the Arthur Ashe Courage Award until the Politically Correct Obamagarchy forced everyone to be gay. The completely unsourced meme became so prevalent that ESPN had to issue an official statement saying that there was actually no such thing as a runner-up for the award in question.

Yep. Not only is this meme a fat sack of nothing, but as far as people can tell, it came from a single tweet by a Boston radio personality:

That's it. A single, dickwad tweet from someone with literally no credibility was enough to make a viral meme so popular that the world had to stop, take a breath, and re-establish the fact that random signs held up by strangers, even on the Internet, are not to be trusted.

To be sure, Galloway isn't any less deserving of a Courage Award, but in the interest of perspective: Immediately after Jenner came out as transgender, a petition signed by more than 15,000 people made its way to the International Olympic Committee seeking to strip Jenner of her gold medals in men's decathlon, because, "Ms. Jenner (as talented as she is) claims that she has always believed herself to be truly female, and therefore was in violation of committee rules regarding women competing in men's sports and vice-versa." You may recognize that as both ridiculous horseshit and the exact reason Jenner was given an award for courage.

Are terrible Internet memes keeping you awake at night? Send them to Dave on Twitter and he will destroy them for you.

Be sure to follow us on Facebook and YouTube, where you can catch all our video content, such as The Most Absurd Moments In Corporate Facebook History and other videos you won't see on the site!

Also check out 27 Movie Details That Research Proves Are B.S. and 6 Insane News Stories About Terrorism (That Were Total B.S.).