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Alarm bells rippled across the social media platform on Tuesday, Nov. 15, after the hashtag #RIPJimmyFallon began trending, leading many to believe the 48-year-old Tonight Show host and former Saturday Night Live cast member had died.
Naturally, the hoax hashtag spread like wildfire on Twitter.
Perhaps nobody was more shocked about the purported death than Fallon himself, a Hudson Valley native who grew up in Ulster County, in Saugerties, and was, by all accounts, very much still alive.
At 9:34 p.m., Fallon posted a tweet directed at Twitter owner and CEO Elon Musk that read: “Elon, can you fix this? #RIPJimmyFallon.”
Musk, whose often brash tweets have earned him the nickname Chief Troll among his many critics, wasn’t much help.
After nearly 12 hours, he finally responded with a simple: “Fix what?”
The hashtag was still trending early Wednesday morning, Nov. 16, with many users accompanying it with pictures of other celebrities, including Matt Damon, James Corden, and fellow late-night host Jimmy Kimmel.
Critics of Musk’s takeover at the social media giant have pointed to an uptick in disinformation spreading on the platform after Musk fired a large number of outsourced workers who had been tasked with content moderation and handling phony accounts and fake news.
One example of this came Thursday, Nov. 11, when someone using the name and logo of pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly & Co. tweeted, “We are excited to announce insulin is free now.”
The phony tweet resulted in the company’s stock dropping from $368 a share to $346 a share, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Fallon is a graduate of the College of Saint Rose in Albany.
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