Did Orca really kill trainer Jessica Radcliffe? The truth behind the virus clip
This virus moment turns out to be nothing more than a whale in the story.
After a whale trainer named Jessica Radcliffe spread to social media where she was killed by ORCA, it was revealed that not only does Radcliffe exist, but the entire video was a hoax.
Instead, several outlets confirmed that the video was generated by AI.
And in the case of the Seaworld Trainer Dawn Brancheaau, who was drawn into the pool by Orca Tilikum in 2010, there was a real incident in which an animal trainer was killed by a whale, but there were plenty of online hoaxes that caught wildfires.
Take the Steve Burns case, for example. There were rumours that he had died after the Blue Clue Host left Nickelodeon’s children’s show with early augusts. But as Steve often proves, none of them were true.
“Everyone thought I’d been dead for a while,” he told The New York Times last September. “I was like an urban legend. It hurts, honestly, it’s happening while the internet started out with the internet, so it ruined me. No one, including me, was prepared for the degree of consensus it represents.
