Did the actor Michael B. Jordan die suddenly in Chicago on January 13, 2023? No, that's not true: This is a baseless claim by a clickbait website that routinely publishes death hoaxes. There is no evidence that Jordan has died although his name was recently in the news in another death hoax, the subject of a trending TikTok prank.
Angela Bassett's son, Slater Vance, filmed his mother's distressed reaction to a false report of Jordan's death. She and Jordan co-starred in the 2018 movie, "Black Panther." Vance later apologized and took his TikTok video down.
The claim appeared in an article published by 102.5viral.com on January 13, 2023, titled "10 minutes ago in Chicago, 'Actor' Michael-B-Jordan died suddenly at the hospital" (archived here). The body of the article simply repeats the clickbait headline several times:
10 minutes ago in Chicago, 'Actor' Michael-B-Jordan died suddenly at the hospital
Users on social media saw this title, description and thumbnail:
10 minutes ago in Chicago, "Actor" Michael-B-Jordan died suddenly at the hospital
There is no evidence that Jordan has died. His official Twitter and Instagram accounts have no such reports. The most newsworthy story published about Jordan at the time of writing comes from People magazine, which reported on January 10, 2023, that he listed his Los Angeles home for sale.
Lead Stories has reported before on the clickbait websites that use celebrity death hoaxes as a means to entice readers to download malware when deceptive pop-up windows prompt them to download something.
Further evidence that this claim is fabricated are additional death hoax articles that feature identical headlines with different celebrity names. Examples are: "10 minutes ago in Chicago, Actress Judi Dench († 88) died suddenly at the hospital" and "10 minutes ago in Chicago, 'America's Got Talent' Simon Cowell died suddenly at the hospital."
On January 1, 2023, Business Insider reported, "Kids are pranking their parents on TikTok by telling them celebrities have died. Angela Bassett's son may have killed the trend by bluffing about her colleague, Michael B. Jordan." Copies of Slater Vance's TikTok prank video and apology were posted to Twitter on December 31, 2022, by @PopCrave. It is not clear if Vance was reading from one of these death hoax websites or was improvising when he read a false report of Jordan's death to his mother.
