Mediaboss Marketing

1. There was no "three-boob girl."

In September, Alisha Hessler alias Jasmine Tridevil, of Tampa captivated the Internet and confounded plastic surgeons with the claim that she'd gotten a third-breast implant in order to score a reality TV show. (That is, admittedly, a pretty solid MTV pitch.) Alas, the third boob was actually a prosthesis, and as fake as Hessler's hokey pseudonym. In the wake of her viral fame, Hessler is apparently pursuing a second career as a pop star; she recently finished recording her first song and an accompanying music video.

2. 4chan didn't leak Emma Watson's nudes.

Let's be clear: 4chan was responsible for a lot of other shenanigans this year. But when a threatening website went up in the wake of fall's "Fappening," promising to leak nude photos of actress Emma Watson in revenge for a feminist speech she made at the United Nations, the Internet's most infamous message board was not actually to blame. Instead, both the website and the threat were publicity stunts by a Internet "marketing" company called Rantic, which remains in operation today.

Rantic's business model is fairly sketchy it sells fake web traffic, as well as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter likes but the company's reps have said that the motives behind the Emma Watson hoax were pure. "It was a psychological study, mate," one man told Vocativ. And a bid for free publicity, which definitely worked.

3. That super-viral "drunk girl" video was staged.

This was a big year for "social experiment" videos or it would have been, if some of the so-called experiments weren't actually faked. "Drunk Girl in Public" was particularly egregious in that regard: Its creator, who claimed to have captured a bunch of creeps approaching a pretty drunk girl as she tottered around L.A., had actually coached the men into acting that way. In the backlash that followed, filmmaker Stephen Zhang quietly changed the video's title to "Drunk Girl in Public (Awareness Skit)" and disabled comments on the clip. His company, Stephen Zhang Productions, continues to turn out feel-inducing, social-aware videos; its most recent was called "Helping the Homeless with Thanksgiving Cheer."

4. Bikers did not "surrender" the Brooklyn Bridge to pedestrians.

Remember those mysterious white flags that appeared on the Brooklyn Bridge over the summer? They were placed there, apparently, by two German artists, who have a history of vaguely illegal public art. But before the artists admitted to their work, a parody Twitter account called BicycleLobby tricked half of Twitter, several media outlets, and the NYPD into thinking the flags had something to do with cyclists. And despite the NYPD's attempts to subpoena and expose the people behind the account in connection with the bridge incident, BicycleLobby keeps tweeting blithely on: As of this writing, the account's on a #bikemusical bender.

5. A disfigured 3-year-old was not kicked out of a Mississippi KFC.

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The 10 worst Internet hoaxes of 2014