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Reblog to get a free zoo animal

09
Jun
2011

Remember that “fake cancellation message that gets reblogged to infinity and beyond” on Tumblr from a few weeks ago? It seems to have returned, and in a particularly glorious form:

There will be no free giraffes.

As with the last fake message doing the rounds, this one links to a Tumblr Japan disaster donation post. Clearly people are too caught up in the excitement of naming their new giraffe to care.

As with the last scam / joke / jolly rotten wheeze, Tumblr only lets you comment if you reblog and add your message into the steadily growing pile. And as with last time, everybody is too busy mashing the Reblog button to bother reading about how this yet another fakeout.

If you go back a few steps in the notes, you can see that this was actually another example of “Your blog will be killed until dead” spam, and some humorous individual changed it to “free giraffe” along the way. The first spamrun ended up with about 137,000 notes comprised of reblogs, comments and the odd person yelling that it was a fake.

It’ll be interesting to see how far this one goes (with or without the giraffe, but hopefully with) before someone at Tumblr pulls the plug – we’re currently at 60,000 notes and counting.

I now eagerly await the Tumblr staff dropping a giraffe off outside my house, preferably by helicopter because that’ll seriously impress the neighbours.

Christopher Boyd

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