All Taco Bell Restaurants Closing in Summer 2015-Fiction!
Summary of eRumor:
Viral reports claim that Taco Bell plans to close all its restaurants by summer 2015.
The Truth:
Taco Bell doesn’t plan to close all its restaurants by summer 2015.
That false claim was started by a website called Prank.Link. The website, which used to be called Feed Newz, allows users to create their own fake news stories to “prank” their friends.
The website boasts that the false report about Taco Bell closing all of its restaurants by summer 2015 had “trolled” 522,660 people on social media sites.
This isn’t the first time that reports of Taco Bell closing all of its restaurants went viral. Back in 2011, the infamous fake news publication Weekly World News reported that the restaurant would “close its doors for good” after allegations of false advertising:
“After allegations of false advertising, further investigation causes Taco Bell to close its doors for good.
Taco Bell, the pseudo Mexican restaurant popular among college students, poor people, those without taste buds, and individuals with bad taste in general, has recently been put on the stand for allegations regarding false advertisement.
On Friday, the law firm of Beasley, Allen, Crow, Methvin, Portis, Miles and another partner whose name no one can spell or pronounce, filed a law suit against the Mexican wannabe claiming that the meat mixture contains too many fillers and binders to be labeled as beef.
The majority of the time the meat mix is doused with so much cheese, salsa, and sour cream it is a wonder that anyone could tell it was beef flavored, much less question the authenticity of the meat itself.
Weekly Would News knew that these allegations could only be just the tip of the iceberg so we sent our crack team of reporters to the streets to find out what else could be behind these allegations.
It did not take long for our team to discover that the meat that Taco Bell uses for its beef based products is imported from China. This set off a myriad of bells and whistles on our end so we asked our Japanese WWN affiliates to check out the Kuang Ren factory in the Zhejiang province where the beef is packaged. Within hours our Japanese colleagues were back in touch with a shocking discovery, the so called beef is actually cat and dog meat.”
The disclaimer for Weekly World News says that all information on the website is presented “as is” without any guarantees of quality, accuracy, adequacy, completeness and correctness.
When false reports that Taco Bell would close all of its restaurants first surfaced back in 2011, the chain had been sued over allegations that it had falsely advertised that its menu items contained real beef. The lawsuit was dismissed after Taco Bell changed its marketing strategies and disclosed more information about the “beef product” that it uses, NPR reports.