Michael Jackson isn’t alive; claim is satire

Is the King of Pop going to help take down another music magnate? 

No, Michael Jackson may have danced as a zombie in the music video for his 1982 hit “Thriller,” but his body remains entombed in a mausoleum at the California cemetery where he was laid to rest in 2009.

An Oct. 17 Facebook post’s caption said “SHOCKING NEWS: (VIDEO) Unbelievable! Michael Jackson discovered alive at age 65? And he’s set to testify against (Diddy)!”

Diddy is the stage name of musician and music executive Sean Combs, who was arrested Sept. 16 on federal sex trafficking charges.

The Facebook post included side-by-side images of Combs and what appears to be an artificial intelligence-generated image of Jackson. Inset in those images are another AI-generated image of an older Jackson next to what appears to be Fox News host Jesse Watters and a news chyron that says, “They lied to us!”

The Facebook post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads.)

We found no credible new articles about Jackson being alive in a search of Google and the Nexis news database. And a search of Fox News’ website and YouTube page show no stories or videos about Jackson’s being alive

(Screenshot from Facebook)

We traced the AI-generated image of Jackson that was next to Combs to an image generated using MidJourney in 2023, when Jackson would have turned 65.

The Facebook post making the claim links to an article that doesn’t mention Combs aside from a headline. The image of Watters and an older Jackson is embedded in the article, along with other images speculating what an older Jackson would look like, and a 2017 YouTube video claiming Jackson was alive.

Another Facebook post using the same caption linked to a different article  with the same headline and information. That Facebook account  describes its page as satire/parody.

A reverse-image search of the Watters-Jackson image led us to a Sept. 30 YouTube video with that as the thumbnail. It was on an account that includes a disclaimer noting the channel  “is purely made for entertainment purposes, based on news, rumours, and interesting speculation.”  But the Facebook post resharing the claim did not include this disclaimer. 

The video claims Jackson was spotted alive at age 65, but does not mention Diddy. The YouTube page has multiple AI-generated videos with images of newscasters such as Anderson Cooper or Lester Holt in the thumbnail.

We rate the claim that “Michael Jackson (was) discovered alive at age 65” and will testify against Combs Pants on Fire!