Another hoax: Tattoo of Facebook friends turns out to be temporary

If a video making the rounds online showing a woman getting a tattoo of all her Facebook friends sounded too strange to be true, that’s because it was.

The whole thing turned out to be a publicity stunt perpetrated by a tattoo artist and Holland-based company called Pretty Social. On Wednesday, Rotterdam tattoo artist Dex Moelker came clean, telling the Dutch newspaper The Telegraaf that the tattoo in the viral video was really just a “try-out tattoo” (i.e. washable decal that washes off after a couple of days) and admitting that the video was a “publicity stunt.”

It clearly worked — at first.

Several media outlets, including ABC, CNN, The Washington Post, Huffington Post, TechCrunch, and Forbes picked up the story.

“Ironically, in this case, the ink shop got just what it wanted – a lot of free press,” CNN’s updated blog poster wrote. “ Hats off for an international viral campaign. It’s not great when media outlets worldwide are duped by viral videos or stories – but if you’re looking at it from a marketing perspective – you’ve got to “like” how well they pulled it off.”’

The marriage of Facebook and tattoos, which are all the rage right now, made for a fairly natural viral marketing ploy.

YouTube member “susyj87”’ actually posted the video a week ago. But it became news when  Buzzfeed wrote about it Tuesday  morning. Other media outlets followed suit.

After the Buzzfeed mention (and possibly responding to all the haters making fun of how little Facebook friends she has), “susyj87” added a description to the video.

“Of course I gave it a lot of thought,” she wrote. “These are not all my friends. Just the people I care most about. I got their permission and they were very proud to be on it. To me it represents who I am right now and the time we live in. And of course I love the looks of it. The Tattoo is designed by Pretty Social and the tattoo artist is Tattoo Dex.”

I first saw the YouTube video while browsing Reddit yesterday. I was instantly skeptical, as any atheist and Reddit user should be.  As a viral video, there were plenty of clues hinting that was a fake.

For one, as many Redditors have pointed out, the woman getting the alleged tattoo did not bleed. (Anyone who has gotten a tattoo knows to expect some blood.) For another, while the viewer can see outlines of the tattoos, there are no detailed shots (or photographs) of the actual finished work: Tattoo artists showing their work online usually have close-up “bragging” shots of their work, so something as intricate as the Facebook tattoo would have at least one.

The third, and perhaps most telling, clue:  “susyj87” originally posted the video on May 30th.  A day later,  the video was posted on Pretty Social’s Facebook page. Pretty Social is primarily a service that puts pictures of your Facebook friends on products of your choosing. Using Pretty Social to print tattoos sounded plausible, though a tattoo decal is currently not one of the products offered by Pretty Social.

I  emailed  “susyj87”, the recipient of the Facebook decal, and she replied to my email — before the news broke that it was a hoax.

“I’m pretty overwhelmed by all the media attention,” she wrote. “I wish to stay anonymous for obvious reasons.”

While some YouTubers have liked the tattoo, the majority of viewers were predictably nasty:

“You are a fucking? retard,” one wrote. “I hope you don’t reproduce. Oh and good luck getting any respectable job.”

I emailed “susyj87” again after the news of the hoax broke, and got what appeared to be an automated reply:

“Because of the amazing interest worldwide I can’t respond to all of the questions unfortunately. I will try to give a statement tomorrow. Thanks for all the positive reactions,” she wrote and then put in a plug for the tattoo artist, referring people to Tattoo Dex’s site.

This is hardly the first time that the news media has jumped onto a story before it’s been confirmed.  On Tuesday Texas officials were fooled into thinking a backyard contained numerous dead bodies through tips from a psychic (and several news organizations reported the so-called news) and today Reddit’s IAmA subreddit did a poor job verifying its Emilia Clarke thread.

Perhaps the tattoo itself is a portent of the times: We don’t know what is real on the Internet. And if it is real, it turns out to be only temporary.