Fake News: Young Man Did NOT Stab His Best Friend After He Subscribed To T-Series

Fact Check

  • by: Maarten Schenk
Fake News: Young Man Did NOT Stab His Best Friend After He Subscribed To T-Series

Did a young man named Jacob Paul stab his friend Mike Doors for subscribing to the wrong Youtube channel? No, that's not true: the story was made up by a satire website that often posts made up articles for entertainment purposes. It is not real.

The story originated from an article published by 8Satire on December 5, 2018 titled "Young Man Stabs His Best Friend After He Subscribed To T-Series" (archived here) which opened:

A young Florida Man has been jailed yesterday after he stabbed his best friend, supposedly for "contributing to the end of the world as we know it", and by that he meant "for subscribing to T-Series".

Jacob Paul is a fan of Pewdiepie and his friend Mike Doors wanted to piss him off by subscribing to Pewdiepie. They were both at Paul's house and after he performed the "prank", and Paul went to the kitchen, got a knife and stabbed his so-called "best friend".

Users on social media only saw this title, description and thumbnail so they wouldn't have immediately known it was not from a real news website:

Young Man Stabs His Best Friend After He Subscribed To T-Series

A young Florida Man has been jailed yesterday after he stabbed his best friend, supposedly for "contributing to the end of the world as we know it", and by that he meant "for subscribing to T-Series". Jacob Paul is a fan of Pewdiepie and his friend Mike Doors wanted to piss him off by subscribing [...]

But the site has a disclaimer at the bottom which reads:

8Shit is a satire news and humor website. All its content is fiction (except those posts under the "serious" category) and shouldn't be taken as real. All references, names and marks or institutions in this website are used as contextual elements, like in any novel or science-fiction story.

(Note: the old name of 8satire.net used to be 8shit.net)

PewDiePie has long been the YouTube channel with most subscribers but T-Series is quickly catching up and many people heavily invested in following the race for the top spot:

PewDiePie battles to keep top YouTube spot

YouTuber PewDiePie is battling Indian channel T-Series in a bid to retain his status as the YouTuber with the most subscribers. One fan hacked 50,000 printers over the weekend to print out a message urging people to subscribe to his channel. Both channels have more than 73 million subscribers, with PewDiePie currently in the lead by about 300,000.

No reliable media websites have reported anything about a murder among fans of the channels though.

We wrote about 8satire.com before, here are our most recent articles that mention the site:

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  Maarten Schenk

Lead Stories co-founder Maarten Schenk is our resident expert on fake news and hoax websites. He likes to go beyond just debunking trending fake news stories and is endlessly fascinated by the dazzling variety of psychological and technical tricks used by the people and networks who intentionally spread made-up things on the internet.  He can often be found at conferences and events about fake news, disinformation and fact checking when he is not in his office in Belgium monitoring and tracking the latest fake article to go viral.

Read more about or contact Maarten Schenk

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