How The Internet (Wrongly) Decided It Was Bart Simpson’s Birthday

Did you hear on the Twitters how February 23 was Bart Simpson’s birthday? Netflix tweeted it! Rolling Stone tweeted! Some guy you started following a few months ago and instantly forgot about until now probably tweeted it! Only problem? They were all of them wrong. Here’s how it happened.

According to an in-depth investigation over at Splitsider:

On Tuesday, a Paraguayan soccer player wore a Bart Simpson T-shirt during the Liberadores Cup. Shortly thereafter, “Bart Simpson” became a trending topic on Twitter simply because enough South American soccer fans found it worth a tweet. I watched as hundreds of people asked, “Why is Bart Simpson a trending topic?” Some users just went with it and tweeted their favourite Bart quotes. Within hours, the tweets stopped asking why Bart was trending and stopped sharing favourite quotes, but shifted to wishing Bart Simpson a happy 32nd birthday.

Strangely, illogically, somewhere along the the line, Twitter users decided that the reason Bart Simpson was trending was because it was his birthday.

I’m glad to see that Twitter’s moved on from false celebrity death rumours to false imaginary character birthdays. Progress! Check out the full breakdown of when Bart’s birthday might actually be here: [Splitsider]