The "Lil Tay"/Tay Tian/Claire Eileen Qi Hope mess

[Strelnikov]

For once Wikipedia's lumbering style of editing worked in its favor, because she isn't listed as "dead", while Google's infoboxes say she died on August 9th. In fact, the Wikipedia article has one of those "current event" tags, so things will shift.

Until Elon Musk's shambling, demoralized "X" variant of Twitter began to be flooded with messages that she was dead, I'd never heard of "Lil Tay" (either born in 2008 or 2009) the child rapper/Internet influencer, mostly because she only operated as such from 2017 to 2018. (Yes, she was eight or nine years old when she had this rapping "career" and her bit was that she cursed like a sailor.) We weren't even clear on her real name; was it Claire Eileen Qi Hope or Tay Tian? (Wikipedia claims the latter.) Then the penny dropped, with her ex-manager Harry Tsang claiming on the 10th that he doubted the girl and her older brother Jason Tian were dead as the family claimed. Even the family would not confirm or deny on Instagram their children were dead after the announcement was made on the same website. Tay Tian now claims her Instagram account was hacked.

At time of writing Harry Tsang thinks that Tay Tian faked it all to restart her career, lots of Twitter people agree with him, the Canadian police are not involved as far as I know (yes, all of this happened in Vancouver), I'm sure that more crap will be discovered or disclosed. And the girl will still be dead on Google.

[Strelnikov]

She is still dead on Google.

Google still dropping the ball.

Still dead. 2023-08-11 at 6.43.22 AM.png (43.67 KiB) Viewed 305 times

[ericbarbour]

lol

Someday the history of the early internet will be written--and it will probably carom from one idiotic "scandal" like this to another. Suckering people is not difficult, most of them seem to want to be suckered....but social media makes it a thousand times easier and cheaper. And given the miserable/short lives of most rappers, her fans (?) were probably expecting her to self-destruct.

Frankly I'd never heard of her before this, so it appears that the astroturfing was successful.

[Strelnikov]

lol

Someday the history of the early internet will be written--and it will probably carom from one idiotic "scandal" like this to another. Suckering people is not difficult, most of them seem to want to be suckered....but social media makes it a thousand times easier and cheaper. And given the miserable/short lives of most rappers, her fans (?) were probably expecting her to self-destruct.

Frankly I'd never heard of her before this, so it appears that the astroturfing was successful.

The point of the post was not really Tay Tian, it's how the ruins of Twitter jumped on a death announcement with no proof and Google robotically followed suit. Nobody seemed to do the basic journalistic proofing that any second-tier newspaper would do, probably because all of Google's actions were done by scraper 'bots.

And given the miserable/short lives of most rappers, her fans (?) were probably expecting her to self-destruct.

She hasn't been rapping for years; you have to dig in and find out that her "career" was only three months long (!) and mostly online.