In the minutes and hours after Liam Payne’s death, the internet filled with conspiracy theories and misinformation about what happened.
Tributes poured in for the British singer who became a household name when he was just 16 years old in the boy band, One Direction.
Payne, 31, died when he fell from the third story of an internal courtyard at the CasaSur hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentina on Wednesday.
According to local authorities, a call was made to emergency services by the hotel manager saying a man was behaving aggressively and may have been under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
Liam Payne visits Music Choice in New York City on September 16, 2019. Misinformation about his death has spread on social media.
Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images
Pablo Policicchio, a spokesperson for the Security Ministry of Buenos Aires municipality, told The Associated Press in a statement that Payne “had thrown himself from the balcony of his room,” and paramedics found him dead on arrival.
Following the news of his death, social media began to fill with theories and misinformation. One example was the sharing of a video showing a man falling from a building, which many people claimed to be Payne.
The graphic video, which has been viewed millions of times, shows a man falling to the ground outside a building as people in the street screamed in horror, and was posted prolifically to X, formerly Twitter.
However, users on the platform fact checked the video and found it was footage of a man falling from his apartment in Mexico City in 2023. The man jumped from his bedroom window after a fire broke out in his apartment and was subsequently taken to hospital, as reported in local media at the time.
One X account, @manimax82, got 2.4 million views on its post containing the video, while many others reshared it to their own accounts before it had been verified or fact checked.
Another account, @porquettarg, shared a blurry photo of a man sitting in the window of an apartment building over an elevated courtyard and claimed it was Payne in the minutes before his death. That post had 4.4 million views at the time of writing, but people in the replies were quick to point out the photo was of another individual and the building looked nothing like the hotel where Payne died.
One person claimed to have a friend actually at the hotel where Payne died who had witnessed him falling.
“Mutual friend is in Argentina at the same hotel as Liam Payne and she said he just jumped off his balcony????? There are ambulances everywhere and things are nuts. I sincerely hope he’s okay if this actually happened. Holy smokes dude!!!!” wrote X user, @NsbSo in a post that has been 14.4 million times.
Newsweek contacted @NsbSo by direct message for comment.
The person also shared screenshots of the alleged interaction with their friend in Argentina telling them about the incident and what they saw. They alleged that Payne seemed like he was “acting highly abnormal” and did not “seem like he was in a good place.”
Online Misinformation
The issue of misinformation, which is otherwise known as “fake news” being spread on social media is nothing new, but research from 2021 found people, especially younger people, have a hard time identifying misleading content. The U.K. Safer Internet Center found that more than half of young people surveyed had encountered more misleading content online that year than in the previous year and 43 per cent said their friends often shared fake news online.
More than half of Americans get their news from social media, beating out traditional media sources such as, newspapers, TV and radio, according to the Pew Research Center.
One of the issues with online misinformation is that it can spread 10 times faster than accurate news, per researchers at MIT.
“When explosive, misinforming posts go viral, their corrections are never as widely viewed or believed,” wrote the PIRG Education Fund in a 2023 article about misinformation. “The outrageous ‘fact; that blasts through audiences is louder, stickier, and more interesting than a follow-up correction. In the race between the false but interesting and the true but boring, the interesting story wins.”
Payne is survived by his seven-year-old son, Bear, whom he shares with ex-partner and fellow singer, Cheryl, also known as Cheryl Cole.
If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988, text “988” to the Crisis Text Line at 741741 or go to 988lifeline.org.
