FALSE: DJ Loonyo dies in Antipolo car accident

At a glance:

• Claim: Social media personality DJ Loonyo died in a car crash, according to a blog post purporting to be a GMA News report.
• Rating: FALSE
• The facts: DJ Loonyo is still alive and has been active on social media. There have been no official news reports about his death.
• Why we fact checked this: This was flagged by Facebook’s Claim Check tool as potentially misleading. Posts with this claim have been shared around 2,200 times.

Complete details:

A blog post that began to circulate on Saturday, November 28, claimed that social media personality DJ Loonyo died in a car crash in Antipolo.

At least 13 different posts with the same claim were flagged by Facebook’s monitoring tool Claim Check as potentially misleading. These have been shared at least 2,200 times collectively as of posting.

This is false. DJ Loonyo is still alive.

There have been no official news reports of him dying or being injured in a car crash.

He has also been posting on his official social media accounts even after rumors of his death spread on November 28. As of publication, his last posts on Facebook and Twitter were on November 29 and November 30, respectively.

The blog post about his death misleadingly used GMA News’ branding to appear real. The website URLs that spread the rumor were gma-n3wsupdate.xyz and balitang-247.xyz, referring to GMA News’ news show 24 Oras.

The video embedded in the posts only plays a few seconds of Iya Villania saying, “Nagdadalamhati ngayon ang…” (Today, we are mourning…). Villania is the host of the entertainment segment “Chika Minute” on 24 Oras. After the short clip, viewers are warned that the video contains mature content and asks them to share it to continue watching.

On YouTube, the video was uploaded to the channel “CNN Saturnino” on November 27 and has had 57,201 views as of posting. – Vernise Tantuco/Rappler.com

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