10 Things the Internet Swears by That Simply Aren’t True

Didn’t your parents tell you that you shouldn’t believe anything you read or anybody you speak to on the internet? And didn’t your teachers used to say that Wikipedia wasn’t a reliable source for research papers? The ultimate irony of this is that many of your parents have perhaps since fallen down the rabbit hole of credulously taking everything they read online at face value. Oops! And online resources like Wikipedia have gotten pretty darn good at fact-checking and all that.

But no matter how good certain parts of the internet may be (and how bad your parents might be at parsing information), there are a million things the internet insists are true that just… aren’t. In this list today, we’ll cover ten of those so-called “facts” that are actually completely phony. No matter how many people online parrot these tidbits—and no matter how long they keep sticking around—they’re still not true. Sorry. But at least now you know!

Related: Top 10 Unsolved Internet Mysteries

10 Go to Sleep!

There has been a rumor going around the internet for quite a while now that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has supposedly approved a dart gun that puts children to sleep. As the rumor goes, the gun works as a pretty simple tranquilizer. You aim it at your un-sleeping child, you pull the trigger, and a dart shoots into their neck and immediately puts them to sleep. If you’re a parent, and you remember those endless nights back when your kids were younger when they wouldn’t go to sleep, that certainly sounds like a fun and useful solution, doesn’t it?

But it’s also absolutely insane. The optics alone make it so that the FDA would never approve a dart gun that would allow parents to hunt down their children and get them to bed for the night. Sadly, for those overtired parents among us who are sick of reading books and praying their kids finally doze off, this rumor is completely phony. That said, we do have one possible solution here: having Samuel L. Jackson read Go the F**k to Sleep to your kids instead. Perhaps that would scare them straight and knock them out cold!^[1]

9 Er, No, Stay Awake!

Back in 2017, a news website called the “World Daily News Report” published a story about a morgue worker in Beaumont, Texas, who supposedly got incinerated by his colleagues after he fell asleep on the job. They mistakenly misrecognized his nap as that of a dead body ready to be burned up into ashes, so they threw him in the fire and blazed him away.

“According to the Beaumont Police Department, 48-year-old Henri Paul Johnson decided to take a nap on a stretcher after working for sixteen hours straight,” the report stated. “While he was sleeping, another employee mistook him for the corpse of a 52-year-old car accident victim and carried him to the crematory. Before anyone could notice the mistake, he had already been exposed to temperatures ranging between 1400 to 1800 degrees Fahrenheit and reduced to ashes.”

Sounds like an awful way to die, right? Well, it certainly would be… if it were true. According to online fact-checkers, that story is completely false, and the “World News Daily Report” isn’t exactly the most trustworthy source out there. Nevertheless, the story still has legs. Even today, despite being thoroughly debunked, it keeps making its way around social media. The moral here is to never nap on the job!^[2]

8 Twinkie Time

Undoubtedly, you’ve all heard this long-standing internet rumor: that Twinkies last forever. Some bloggers, forum hoppers, and social media users have claimed that the magic number is actually seven years of shelf life. Others have even taken it a step further online and claimed (for years and years now!) that Twinkies, like cockroaches, could survive a nuclear apocalypse. We’re not sure if cockroaches can really survive that level of devastation, but we know for a fact that Twinkies cannot. The delicious little convenience store snacks won’t last forever. They won’t last years. They won’t even last months!

Officially, the shelf life of the mass-produced baked treat is just 25 days. That’s it! If a Twinkie goes on the shelf at a 7-Eleven or somewhere else around the world, and it doesn’t sell in the first three(ish) weeks, it’s technically supposed to be yanked from the store and tossed in the trash. As it’s been determined, Twinkies are no good to eat more than 25 days after production.

So much for all those claims about them lasting forever, right? They couldn’t even make it a month! Yet, for some reason, the internet just can’t stop viewing Twinkies as some eternal being. Maybe it’s all the highly processed crap that makes up their delicious ingredient list.^[3]

7 Reject THIS!

It’s always been tough to get into college—especially at the best colleges in the country, like North Carolina’s esteemed Duke University. So it made sense that in 2015, a Tumblr post started going around that claimed to be from a high school senior who’d been rejected by Duke. As the story went, a girl named Siobhan O’Dell had applied for admission at Duke. Sadly, their admissions officers rejected her application. Apparently upset at Duke’s rejection letter sent her way, O’Dell fired off a rejection letter in return. That’s right! She supposedly rejected their rejection!

Things got even funnier when Duke (allegedly) came right back over the top and rejected her rejection of their rejection with yet ANOTHER rejection letter. Confused yet? Don’t worry, because we are, too. And we’re also relieved because we don’t need to track this rejection rumor any deeper than that. Because it never happened! O’Dell’s “story” is totally made up, and the Tumblr post that kicked it all off is 100% phony. It’s pretty darn funny to think about, though. You can’t reject us if we reject you first!^[4]

6 Really Milking It…

Do you have any idea why chocolate milk is brown? If you’ve been on the internet for any time across the last, oh, 25 or so years, you’d know the “answer” to that question is one of two options. Some say that chocolate milk contains cow’s blood, and it was rejected as regular milk and used for the “chocolate” variety after milk companies figured out how to sweeten it up and make it taste like chocolate. Other internet theories are even more hilarious in claiming that chocolate milk only comes from brown cows. At least that one is funny, as opposed to the (very disturbing) first claim.

But neither one of ’em is true! We hope you know that by now, but just in case you don’t, we will lay it all out there now. Chocolate milk is the product of (completely normal, blood-free) cow’s milk combined with real, actual chocolate. What a concept, right? For some reason, the internet has never believed this. And there are still people online who insist the whole chocolate milk industry has come about because of cow’s blood… or brown cows. They’re dead wrong, but they’ve been parroting that line for so long now that at least they’re consistent in their wrongness.^[5]

5 Flu-Like Symptoms

The idea that the flu shot is supposedly filled with the actual flu is nearly as old as dealing with the flu itself. For years now, we’ve all heard that story: that when you go to get the flu shot, in order to inoculate yourself from the flu in future months during the worst of its season, you get jabbed with a very small amount of the actual flu. That’s why you (supposedly) often get sick in the few days after the flu shot. But here’s the thing: it’s totally phony. In fact, the poor CDC has been yelling from the rooftops that it’s a total myth for years. Yet the internet just keeps on believing it!

In reality, the injected flu vaccine contains a strain of an inactivated flu virus that is used to prepare your immune system to fight the actual flu if and when it comes around every winter. The inactivated virus doesn’t give you the flu. It can’t! You simply can react in a slightly feverish or achy way because your immune system is being tasked with preparing itself to do battle against the actual, scary flu. That’s a totally normal response. Give it a day or two of light living, and you’ll be back to normal. Without the flu. But armed to fight it!^[6]

4 Cadbury Controversy

There’s no question that Cadbury’s chocolate treats are very, very delicious. But are they so delicious that they are fatal? That’s the claim that’s been floating around online for about a year now. Well, to be more specific, the actual claim is very disturbing: A Cadbury employee was supposedly arrested for adding his HIV-infected blood to the company’s chocolates. No, seriously. Who comes up with these things?!

A rumor circulated on social media over the last 12 months that this HIV-positive employee supposedly decided to try to infect possibly millions of people with his virus-addled blood. But that claim is completely false. No Cadbury employee was ever arrested for doing that, and there’s never been any indication that someone even attempted something like that. So, you can rest assured that any rumor about “HIV-infected blood” in Cadbury eggs (or its other chocolates) is an insane and mind-blowing lie.

By the way, those reading this who have been online for a while by now will recognize that this is not the first time a rumor like this has surfaced. Back in the day, people claimed that the same thing was going on with Pepsi’s products. And after that rumor ran its course, internet denizens tried to sell the same saga about Mango Frooti. Maybe we’ll all finally learn that this bloodlust is a bunch of crap. Or maybe we’ll be destined to repeat the rumor with yet another new product in another few years…^[7]

3 Rooted in Rumor

Root canals are definitely one of the least fun and exciting things that you can experience. But are they so bad that they cause terminal cancer? There’s been a rumor flying around on the internet for a few years now that people who get root canals have an insanely increased chance of falling victim to terminal cancer. That’s not exactly a pleasant rumor to read! After all, isn’t it always better to make sure your teeth and mouth are healthy? Yikes!

Thankfully, the internet got this one completely and totally wrong. There is absolutely no connection between root canals and terminal cancer. You are not at a higher rate of risk for getting cancer just because you got a root canal. And taken a step further, people who take care of their teeth actually tend to live much longer and have significantly better health outcomes in general than people who look the other way when it comes to brushing, flossing, mouthwash, and, yes, even root canals. Take care of your teeth, people! Let this weird and unsettling internet rumor die.^[8]

2 Spider Stupidity

Here’s a story that predates the internet, if you can believe it—but it’s been spread endlessly by online forums and social media, nevertheless. As this myth goes, back in the 1950s, a woman was wearing a huge bouffant hairstyle… as was the trend at the time. It was a lot of work to get it all dressed and up and perfect. So much work, in fact, that she flat-out refused to let it come back down and restart the work process all over again the next day. So she left it up. She never combed it out, she never washed it out, and she fell asleep with it every night.

Until she found that a spider had taken up residence in her hair one day. Uh-oh! The bouffant stayed up for so long and got so crusty that cobwebs eventually began to form. The spider made her hair its home and spent a life inside there. At some point, the myth claims that the spider gave birth to a baby spider, which then supposedly climbed down from the hair and bit the woman in her sleep. That bite, goes the story, was fatal. And there’s the lesson in this wild urban legend: always wash out your bouffant.

But if you couldn’t tell already based on the theme of this entire post, the spider story is completely phony. There’s never been any incident (on the record, at least) where a woman’s bouffant became home to a spider. And while certain bites from certain spiders can be fatal, nobody has ever been bitten and killed in this context.

The crazy thing is that this rumor has been around for a very, very long time. In the ’50s, it was the bouffant. In the ’60s, it centered on unkempt hippie hair. And in the ’90s, unwashed dreadlocks were the supposed culprit. Through it all, the internet keeps spreading it around. Even though it’s as phony as can be!^[9]

1 Spider Gum

Who doesn’t love Bubble Yum? If you were a kid in the ’70s or ’80s, you probably distinctly remember that first time (or those first few times) that you chomped down on a tasty piece of Bubble Yum. It was practically a religious experience back then! Kids today will never know what that was like. However, even back then (and certainly after the internet came around), Bubble Yum was the subject of a very disturbing rumor. And it, like the bouffant brouhaha, was also about spiders.

As the story went, Bubble Yum was supposedly made of spider eggs, or maybe spider legs, or possibly even spider webs. (Rumors flying around claimed all kinds of different sources, but they all had to do with spiders.) Allegedly.) Before the internet, it was a pretty annoying rumor. After the internet, it blew up and went viral again, and again, and again.

Things got so bad, in fact, that the company that produces Bubble Yum actually spent more than $100,000 in legal fees trying to battle the rumor. It was all in vain. The internet is wrong a lot, as we’ve seen, but one thing is for certain: it just doesn’t quit.^[10]

fact checked by
Darci Heikkinen