Drake died on Sunday, or so that was the conclusion some of the Internet and even respectable news outlets had run on their sites.

It all began when rumors started to bubble around the possibility of his death under the message board site 4chan. The general consensus of what they were telling everyone, via a comment section of his “Hotline Bling” video on the website, was that the Toronto native died in a Los Angeles car accident.

Users wrote “RIP Drake,” among other shocking and rather saddening denouncements all under the assumption that if someone else said it it must be true. If that wasn’t bad enough, news outlets – even reputable ones – decided that was enough to at least let a post fly about random people proclaiming Drake’s supposed death.

Buzzfeed was the first site the false news spread to via a community post. That eventually made its way over to Yahoo! as syndicated news on the website’s front page. Even CNN had the story floating around on their website though syndication. All were removed shortly after with some, including Buzzfeed, leaving editor’s notes about the mishap. The OVO rapper’s Wikipedia page also had him dying on November 22 until that was also changed.

While none of the news outlets officially reported that Drake had either died from a car accident or was critically injured, it’s unfathomable how a community post was turned into syndicated content and thus spread amongst numerous reputable news websites. Looks like some of these sites need to filter what content is eligible to be picked up by others.

Twitter reacted to the news of Drake’s fake death, but it seemed fishy that more users didn’t freak out. Most commented about the incident after they found out it wasn’t true. Leave it to social media to react after they know more about the situation. This whole thing was backward from the jump.

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