A Pakistan-based company has issued an apology after mistakenly advertising a non-existent Halloween parade in Dublin, Ireland. According to The Guardian, the error, attributed to a “human mistake”, led to thousands of people turning up on the Irish capital’s main street on Thursday, awaiting the event. A viral video showed throngs of people lining both sides of O’Connell Street for a supposed procession of giant Halloween puppets made by one of Ireland’s best-known theatre groups, the Galway performance company Macnas.
Sharing the video on X, filmmaker Bertie Brosnan said, “The SCAM Halloween Parade in Dublin City Centre (everyone was ghosted ) Definitely thousands, potentially into 10’s of thousands, showed up. This happened on the 31st of October from 7pm at the top of O’Connell Street in Dublin City.”
Take a look at the video:
The SCAM Halloween Parade in Dublin City Centre (everyone was ghosted 📷) Definitely thousands, potentially into 10’s of thousands, showed up.
This happened on the 31st of October from 7pm at the top of O’Connell Street in Dublin City.#halloweenparade #hoaxparade pic.twitter.com/ldt2Skr2CI— Bertie Brosnan (@BrosnanBertie) October 31, 2024
According to The Guardian, the crowds had turned up to see the event which was listed on the My Spirit Halloween website. It falsely advertised that the Macnas parade would take place between 7pm and 9pm on Thursday. However, when the crowds reached the location, Dublin police started to disperse then saying that no such event was taking place.
The company behind the website later clarified that it was a simple human error. It explained that a member of their team had mistakenly copied the notice for last year’s event and inserted it into this year’s calendar.
The website aggregates content all over the world. The misleading information had gone viral on social media and even ranked highly in Google searches ahead of Halloween.
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The Guardian reported that the Pakistan-based man behind the site has since apologised saying he was “depressed” and “embarrassed”. “We are highly embarrassed and highly depressed, and very sorry,” Nazir Ali said.
“It was our mistake and we should have doubled checked it to make sure it was happening. But newspapers are reporting that we posted it intentionally and this is very, very wrong,” he added.
The error, however, has sparked a discussion about the dangers of misinformation and AI deepfakes. On social media, one user said that she laughed at the “ake parade story, however, she added that it showed “how easy it is to spread misinformation”.
“This is just halloween, now think of how many people are fed with misinformation online on other issues,” said another user.
“That was quite funny, but all of a sudden when that becomes something a little bit more serious and people are putting out AI images of me, for example, saying something that I would never say contrary to my own values, that’s something that’s not too far off the horizon,” said Gary Gannon, who is a member of parliament.
