The challenge has its own hashtag: #deadpose, which people use on social networking sites when posting photos of themselves pretending to have died in a number of scary scenarios. There are pictures of “victims” lying in awkward poses, pretending to have been butchered, hit by a car, hanged, or having fake axes in their heads, covered with blood.
The macabre craze started in South Africa and is reported to have been created by high school student Karabo Mnisi, 19, from Soshanguve in Pretoria. The teenager told the Pretoria News that the challenge was inspired by an iconic picture from South Africa’s apartheid history – the image of fatally-injured Hector Pieterson who was killed in the Soweto Uprising of 1976.
Mnisi claimed that the craze will continue to spread and become more graphic until his set target of 40,000 followers on Facebook has been reached, which means that he would be the most followed “Feleb” (Facebook celebrity) in South Africa. Now he is in 6th place with 26,000 followers, he said.
#Deadpose challenge has prompted a storm of outrage and morbid curiosity and has been criticized for mocking death and attracting bad luck. Mnisi said he expected criticism, and started the challenge for fun thinking it was “no different from the ice bucket challenge.”
Sometime the prank goes very wrong. For example, a recent clip shows a little child wailing and trying to awake her “lifeless” aunt who was playing dead for the cruel #deadpose. Bontle Goitsimang, the mother of the two-year-old girl in the video faces calls for her to be prosecuted and lose custody of the girl.
Outraged social media users who want to make their views known use another hashtag – #deadposemustfall. They say that we live in a sick society where people do not appreciate the lives they live.
#deadposemustfall… We live in a sick society straight! Just saw a child crying thinking his mom is dead #sad
— Thabisile Mabuza (@MabuzaThabisile) 10 января 2017 г.
People take their lives for granted and do not fully appreciate the lives that they live. #deadposemustfall
— Freaky☆Hardcore (@iAM_Taola) 10 января 2017 г.
Did you know Satan came to SA last week?#Deadposemustfall
— Mr Chef Ditebogo Gao (@gaowelwe) 10 января 2017 г.
In December 2016, a 12-year-old girl from Cedartown‚ Georgia‚ in the United States live-streamed her suicide on Facebook. Now the police have to battle to remove the video from the internet.
The most popular flash trend of 2016 was the Mannequin Challenge where people stood frozen like mannequins while a moving camera filmed them. The videos of the challenge were posted by Hillary Clinton, the International Olympic Committee, State Duma deputies, ISS astronauts, well-known companies, brands and many celebrities.
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