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Crowds of revelers lined the streets of Dublin, Ireland, this week for a Halloween parade, but there was one major problem: The city was not hosting a parade.
Residents were duped by fake, AI-enhanced ads that reportedly originated on a Pakistan-based Facebook page called My Spirit Halloween, according to Stephen McDermott, an editor at The Journal FactCheck, a publication focused on tackling misinformation in Ireland.
The Facebook page included costume contest guidelines and promised a “spectacular display.” Other social media accounts shared the event, widely disseminating the false information and leading the Gardaí, or Irish national police, to issue a statement last night: “Please be advised that contrary to information being circulated online, no Halloween parade is scheduled to take place in Dublin City Centre this evening or tonight.”
Some posts featured Halloween-themed images generated by AI, captioned with hashtags that helped them become discoverable in Google search results. The page owners have since deleted all posts and removed their location.
Those behind the Facebook page were presumably trying to drive traffic to their similarly named website to cash in on ad revenue. The website is still live and advertising events in more cities, including three on Nov. 1—one in Canada and two in Australia.
As Ireland-based publication Goosed notes, “running a website is relatively cheap, [and] for niche seasonable topics like Halloween, it can be easier to rank” on Google.
According to The Journal FactCheck, Dublin has held Halloween parades in the past (pictured above) but did not have one scheduled for this year.
“So people might expect one, both down to our enjoyment of parades in general and Ireland being Halloween’s spiritual home,” Goosed says. (Halloween’s origins trace back to a Celtic celebration in Ireland, celebrated over 2,000 years ago.)
This particular incident is pretty harmless, and people appear to have left the area without incident. But online misinformation has been used for more nefarious purposes. False reports on X about an illegal immigrant stabbing a 5-year-old girl fueled violent far-right protests in 2023, spreading at a rate that “surprised” the Gardaí, the Irish Times reports. A similar incident happened in the UK this summer following a stabbing rampage that left three children dead.
