Thousands of people gathered in Dublin, Ireland on Thursday night for a Halloween parade that was never going to happen. Videos and photos posted on social media showed large crowds gathered in central Dublin, but it appears they were all duped by what appears to have been an elaborate online hoax.
“People waiting for a Halloween parade,” one social media user posted Thursday, with a photo showing crowds lining Dublin’s O’Connell Street, a main avenue in the capital.
They noted that there were no police or event staff on the scene, and “no official announcement, people waiting on the wrong side of the road,” concluding: “Someone did pull a big #hoax #Prank.”
The non-event had been advertised on the website myspirithalloween.com, which promoted multiple Halloween events across the world, including in U.S. cities and in the U.K., Mexico and Australia.
The website had advertised the fake Dublin parade, claiming it was organized by the real Irish performance group Macnas. The event was then touted by social media users on TikTok and Facebook, according to commentary posted online by Ciarán O’Connor, a senior analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue think tank, which looks at the spread of misinformation online.
The website was likely created to generate advertising revenue and included fake reviews, real photos from previous Macnas Halloween events, fake social media pages on Facebook, and AI-generated text, O’Connor said.
Some of the events advertised on the site were real. The page on the site that had featured the details about the purported Dublin parade was altered as of Friday to say it had been “cancelled.”
The “site claims to be based in Illinois, but all signs point to person(s) behind it being based in Pakistan,” O’Connor said in a post on X.
In an effort to break up the crowds Thursday evening, Irish police posted a statement online saying: “Contrary to information being circulated online, no Halloween parade is scheduled to take place in Dublin City Centre this evening or tonight.”
“All those gathered on O’Connell Street in expectation of such a parade are asked to disperse safely,” Ireland’s national police said in a post on X.
Irish state broadcaster RTÉ reported that the large crowds briefly caused disruption to Dublin’s tram lines.
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