Dude uses Facebook to prank the internet into thinking he can see the future
Another day, another internet prank.
A man by the name of Pablo Reyes on Facebook has successfully trolled the internet into thinking he could predict the future by using a simple feature on Facebook's timeline.
In the post, dated December 26, 2015, Reyes makes a number of predictions about the year 2016, most of which have already come true.
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Additionally, he noted that Donald Trump will die, just to add a little bit of excitement to the prank and get the attention of the Secret Service. The post has been shared more than 188,000 times at the time of writing.
Of course this freaked out a whole bunch of Facebook users. You know, the platform where people thought Mark Zuckerberg was going to give away millions of dollars to random users.
So how did he do it?
Elena Cresci from The Guardian noticed that Reyes edits old posts in order to make him look like some time-predicting genius.
However, it's not clear that the post has been edited until you click on the arrow next to the post.
Then the revision history pops up.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
As BuzzFeed points out, if you head to your Timeline to share a status you can set a date and time on your status, allowing you to add Timeline posts retroactively, down to the minute.
As for Reyes, he claims he works as a Media Executive for the website Huzlers, a fauxtire website that tricks people into sharing fake stories on social media.
In the past, Facebook has tested satire warnings in front of fake articles because it "received feedback that people wanted a clearer way to distinguish satirical articles from others in these units."
Mashable has reached out to Reyes for additional information and comments.
Bonus: Corgi butts in slow motion
[h/t: BuzzFeed]
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Topics Facebook
