In December 2023, false rumors circulated claiming that Eminem, the American rapper whose real name is Marshall Bruce Mathers III, had died. According to multiple news outlets, the hashtag #EminemDead was trending on social media over the weekend of Dec. 10.
For instance, a TikTok video went viral in which user @marcusgiuliani said:
Um okay, I don't know what kind of sick, twisted joke this is, but why is Google saying Eminem died December 10th this year and it's only 12:42 in the morning? It literally just hit 12 [midnight] 43 minutes ago. How is he already dead? When? I don't know who's playing on the Google-nets of the Internet but we're not about to play with Marshall Mathers. We're not about to do this today. Not right now.
Commentators responded with messages indicating disbelief and confusion. The video received more than 9,300 likes, at the time of this writing.
Another post on Reddit featuring the Google result received 2,000 upvotes. Captioned "According to Wikipedia, Eminem will die tomorrow," the user pointed out that the date of his death on his wiki page was marked as occurring the next day, which would have been impossible.
(Image via Reddit account @trynabetwunk)
This rumor is entirely unfounded. Eminem did not die. As of this writing, his Wikipedia page had been corrected. Had he died, reputable news outlets such as The Associated Press would have published obituaries to memorialize his death. That had not happened. Incorrect information often spreads on the internet due to people changing information on collaborative sites such as Wikipedia.
"This was not the result of any manual change by Google," a Google spokesperson said in an emailed statement to Snopes. "Sometimes people vandalize public information sources, like Wikipedia, which can impact the information that appears in Search. We have systems in place that catch vandalism before it impacts Search results, but occasionally errors get through, and that's what happened here. The issue was resolved after our systems processed the correction on Wikipedia.”
The Google search offered no evidence for an onlooker to independently verify the claim, nor did it provide details on Eminem's cause or manner of death.
Additionally, posts on X (formerly Twitter) attempted to quell the false rumor.
(Image via X account @PopBase)
The hoax spread as the artist was making headlines for his recent collaboration with Fortnite, the online gaming platform.
Celebrity death hoaxes are a form of junk news, designed to get gullible readers to linger on a website or engage with a social media user because a famous person is involved. Such articles are often clickbait, if not outright phishing scams. In rare cases, the unfactual rumors are based on faulty reporting or misunderstandings.
Here’s our running list of celebrity death hoaxes, which have targeted everyone from Clint Eastwood to Josh Peck to Sam Elliot to Celine Dion.