The news that Hollywood star Leonardo DiCaprio donated $10 million to Ukraine turned out to be fake news.
CNN reported on the 12th (local time), "The news that DiCaprio donated $10 million to Ukraine is fake news. We confirmed it through a source close to us."
"It is also false information that his maternal grandmother is from Odessa, Ukraine."
According to CNN, DiCaprio's maternal grandmother, Helen Inderbecken, was born in Germany and died in Germany in 2008.
It turns out that DiCaprio's family is not of Ukrainian descent.
The first place to report the news of DiCaprio's donation was GSA News, which mainly delivers news from Guyana in South America.
The media is said to have reported on DiCaprio's donation after seeing a Facebook post by a Ukrainian woman.
The media's founder, Patrick Carpen, told CNN, "GSA News has a small number of subscribers, so I thought that even if an article was found to be untrue, it could be corrected immediately." It has grown,” he said.
Visegrad.org, which delivers news related to Visegrad countries such as the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, also announced the donation of DiCaprio through the official SNS Visegrad24 Twitter on the 7th (local time).
Visegrad 24 was an account with about 200,000 followers, so the news spread around the world in an instant.
Citations from the world's leading media also followed.
The Independent and Daily Mirror in the UK, Euro News in France, and ET Online, an American entertainment information site, reported related news.
These companies have now deleted articles or published corrections.
But the speed of fake news spreading around the world has been tremendous.
(SBS Entertainment News reporter Kim Ji-hye)