10 TV Hoaxes That Fooled Everyone
8. Yelp Sued Matt Stone & Trey Parker For Slander - South Park
South Park has never shied away from courting controversy over the last near-quarter century, so when it was reported in 2015 that online review site Yelp had filed a $10 million lawsuit against the show's creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, there wasn't much reason to second-guess it.
The report claimed that Yelp filed suit in response to the season 19 episode "You're Not Yelping," which makes fun of Yelp's popularity and influence in the online sphere, characterising the site's reviewers as malicious and entitled.
The suit apparently claimed that the episode presenting Yelp's critics as racist, terrorist freeloaders was grounds for libel and slander, to which Stone and Parker allegedly replied:
"We have given Yelp and their lawsuit only one star... It is our personal opinion that Yelp could do a much better job by not suing us for ten million dollars."
As easy as this all is to believe, neither the lawsuit nor Stone and Parker's response were real - they were concocted by fake news cesspool NewsExaminer to harvest clicks and nothing else.
Yelp themselves soon enough responded to the story to clarify that, as fans of the show, they weren't suing South Park:
"The rumor about a Yelp lawsuit is entirely untrue and was started by a satire site that has received far too much media credibility... We have no interest in legal action against the fantastic team that makes the South Park magic happen."