Isn’t it funny that we have one day of the year dedicated to “trick or treat” as thousands of Dubliners get tricked into believing they had a Halloween parade to look forward to. It’s the morning after, and I’m left with more questions than answers.
What Happened?
Long story short, someone runs a website dedicated to Halloween. The website is full of seemingly AI-generated content dedicated to Halloween “news” from around the world. I’m sure some of it is true, but the goal of the website isn’t to be factual. It’s to rank really high in Google Search through practicing Search Engine Optimisation techniques. You don’t need to know about that, but this isn’t a bad thing alone. It becomes bad when someone beats the algorithm with a website like this.
The biggest issue came when the people behind the website spotted that it would be easy to rank for search terms like “halloween parade 2024”. They created a couple of pages for this, which I’m not linking to because it would benefit their site. The pages would have been brilliant in structure for being helpful, but only if there was an actual parade and not the one they had made up just to write the content.
Unfortunately, the situation got exacerbated when people on social media started to generate content too. TikToks of fake events in Dublin along with posts saying how excited they were about the schedule.
The entire thing became a loop of lies that thousands of people fell for, turning out on O’Connell Street wondering where the phantom parade was.
What We’ve Learned from the Fake Dublin Halloween Parade?
I’ve spent the evening looking at Goosed.ie’s site analytics. About an hour before the “parade” was to begin, I spotted someone on TikTok asking about the event. I hadn’t heard of it so starting looking into it. After one Google Search I could see what was happening. A guy was live streaming his way to an event that wasn’t real. So I published an article explaining it. Thousands of people have read that article. I’m sure most of which were on O’Connell Street last night.
So what have we learned?
People Don’t Fact Check News
What headline to use for this section? People ignore red flags? I don’t know. But it’s becoming increasingly obvious that the people of Ireland desperately need access to the resources to spot fake news and opportunist online websites. Considering we’re all be bombarded with scam text messages, it’s stunning how many people looked at that website and thought there would really be a parade. This website was clearly load with ads just to make money from people seeing those ads.
I’d like to say there’s some defense to be offered by it being on both the website and social media, with countless people amplifying and seemingly giving the parade some sort of validation. But it was just a spiral of misinformation.
We should all pay massive attention to something like this happening. It now gives bad actors the playbook for what works here. We all need to be on high alert. These techniques will drive much more harmful division into the public than a silly fake Halloween parade.
While we, the public, have to shoulder some of the blame, so too does local government.
Dublin City Council’s Website is Poor
I use an The fake article promising a non-existent parade was really well structured. The content was deep and informative while being laid out in a format that would be incredibly good for both readers and search engines. It had all the hallmarks of a great piece of content on a website that specialised in the area of Halloween.
On mobile, I saw all the ads and knew it was a scam right away. On desktop I have an ad blocker and this is where I could see that under all the ads, there was good, if not false, content.
But why did this rank higher in Google than official sources of news like the Dublin City Council website?
Unfortunately, Dublin City Council’s website isn’t designed to reach people. It’s designed to be the typical government-style website that ticks the box of having information available. It’s built on a platform called Drupal. To me this says the development team made a decision to take some control away from marketing. This means creating content and adding features is harder than say a website built in WordPress. Now it’s a fair point to argue it’s more secure and after the HSE attack and that is really important.
But making announcements and content that actually reaches people is also important. Does Dublin City Council have a team of people making the website better? Writing content to make sure the people of Dublin are informed? Or do they just routinely put up the “tick box” content like this Halloween events update.
In a digital age, it’s just not good enough. And websites like the one with the fake parade know this, capitalising on the opportunity.
The DCC is in the middle of shaping a digital strategy, so I do hope that some effort is made to improve the content made available to the public, removing the opportunity of fake news websites completely.
The Problem With Common Sense…
I’m very reluctant to go in extremely hard on the people who lined the streets last night. However, I do have to question why so many people stayed around for so long. It’s a fascinating deep dive into the psychology of individuals and big groups.
The fake “parade route” had no Gardai, no barricades, no food trucks or medical personnel. The streets were open with Dublin busses still doing their usual routes. There were no “big budget” costume or floats lining up for the event nor was there any media covering it.
This was clearly fake from the website, but as soon as you hit the city centre it should have become even more obvious. But the masses of people that stood around was in the thousands (not hundreds RTÉ reported).
We all need to start thinking more. I genuinely worry about what social media has done to our ability to assess the world around us critically.
Dublin Should Have a Halloween Parade
It’s impossible to ignore the simple fact that Dublin should host a Halloween parade in 2025. The demand is clearly there. Ireland is the home of Halloween and we don’t give it the justice it deserves. Coinciding with the Bram Stoker festival, there’s a massive opportunity here to get behind a proper event for 2025.
Galway’s Macnas event offers up an interesting blueprint of style and storytelling, though I do believe Galway should be left ot have Macnas to themselves – they’ve nailed it.
That fake website had countless other cities and towns that didn’t fall into this trap. That’s because there was no demand. Now we know there is huge demand. We’ll just need a be campaign so people know it’s actually a real parade in 2025 if it does happen.
I’m sure there’s more to take away from this, but I truly hope that both the public and local government act on the likes of this or worse never happening again.
