Woody Allen not dead, despite latest Twitter rumor

For a moment, we started to think that 2017 had officially claimed its first major celebrity victim — and you of course have social media to thank for that.

Tonight, a rather nasty rumor started to spread that Woody Allen, the prolific filmmaker and actor who recently starred alongside Miley Cyrus in Amazon’s “Crisis in Six Scenes,” had died. There were several fake images and even a Wikipedia entry floating around. However, this is all untrue, as there is no legitimate source claiming that anything has happened to Allen at all. Remember, these are stories that will be broken by legitimate sources, and not by social media in this sort of manner.

To a certain extent, we think at this point that a good half of the people probably tweeting about Allen (and therefore making him a trending topic) are doing so because they saw the trend somewhere and thought that this year was starting to become like 2016. We do understand that.

We are still in recovery from a terrible past 14 days of celebrity deaths, given that the world has lost George Michael, Carrie Fisher, and Debbie Reynolds among others. We hope that everything that has transpired with these three legends is not going to start some sort of systemic trend where people decide that they want to create false rumors and speculation simply to get attention for it — after all, that has worked before, and we saw people creating these sort of hoaxes even before 2016 rolled around. It’s frustrating, especially since the fake-news movement can make things out of control.

So, for now, we can all take a little bit of a deep breath, and we’ll see if 2017 can manage to calm down a little bit and contain a little bit of the madness that we’ve seen over the course of the past few weeks. We know that some of the awards shows out there are going to have a hard enough time as it is getting together In Memoriams that are going to make everyone out there happy. (Photo: Amazon.)