The Internet's desire to kill any celebrity was at its peak last summer [Ed. note: "The Summer of Death"], in the wake of Michael Jackson's passing; in recent months, Twitter-borne rumors of dead celebrities had mostly gone dormant, perhaps waiting for the days to get longer and peoples' internal BS detectors to grow more sun-addled. The fake-death spectre did, however, rear its head last night, when some joker at the multiheaded gossip hydra Oh No They Didn't decided to mock up a TMZ screenshot claiming that Betty White had gone to the Miami retirement complex in the sky.

Why Betty? Why now? Perhaps the yukster-known on Livejournal as "jerseyfux"; her bio reads simply "idk" — was enraged by White's decision to side with Jay Leno in the Late Night Wars. Or maybe she was just sick of people lobbying for her to host "Saturday Night Live." (Either way, we can at least partially blame NBC!)

A glimpse at a screenshot of the ONTD post reveals a bit of trickery that shouldn't have passed even the least savvy gossip-reader's smell test, let alone a moderator at the frantically updated site. Sure, Miss jerseyfux did go to Wikipedia to verify White's age, but everything else was wrong-grandchildren who didn't exist, speculation about foul play involving prescription drugs (gasp!). The post was quickly deleted from the site, but not before word got to Twitter that she'd passed. Unlike pretty much every other fake news story that makes it to Twitter, however, this one seems to have been replaced by actual facts. Is that a sign that the Internet is growing up?

Well, first it has to stop with the whole "killing of celebrities through the spreading of bad data" thing. In the weeks following Jackson's passing last June, famous types ranging from Jeff Goldblum to Harrison Ford to Miley Cyrus were killed off by fake wire stories and cryptic Twitter posts. It's tempting to think that the Internet hive mind's desire to kill celebrities is some sort of weird grasping for community-the immediate hours following a famous person's death tend to be a relatively lulz-free zone when compared to, say, the normal comment-section sniping that accompanies even the most mundane news about those stars. (One could argue that the nature of said mundanity is what contributes to the vitriol-the whole "why should I care about these people?" attitude curdling into rancor.)

For her part, White was enjoying dinner and a show in Los Angeles while people were sitting in front of their computers and speculating about her demise. Living well is the best revenge, right? I don't even know what word in that time-worn cliché would be best to emphasize in this particular case!