←back to thread

Mikhail Gorbachev has died

(www.reuters.com)
970 points homarp | 2 comments | 30 Aug 22 20:37 UTC | HN request time: 0.563s | source
Show context
bloak ◴[30 Aug 22 21:50 UTC] No.32655625[source]▶
I thought the Mandela Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory#Mandela_Effect) was a myth ... but now I experience it myself. I can so clearly remember reading Gorbachev's obituary a few years ago ... Did anyone else have a similar reaction?

(Perhaps I read an article about him on his 90th birthday and assumed it was an obituary?)

replies(1): >>32656404 #
1. sattoshi ◴[30 Aug 22 23:15 UTC] No.32656404[source]▶
This is because his death was misreported in the media a few times. I’m giving it a day before trusting this report of his death.
replies(1): >>32659016 #
2. computator ◴[31 Aug 22 06:18 UTC] No.32659016[source]▶
I wanted to find out how the media could mess up a simple factual story on whether or not a famous person had died. It proved to be quite difficult to google for "Gorbachev death/died/dead misreported/erroneous/false" and lots of other variations; I kept getting hits on current news. But I finally found a report from 2013 here:

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/false-story-about...

The state-run news agency RIA Novosti in Moscow that published the erroneous story for just 5 minutes blamed it on hackers. But the false news spread widely from there.